Though his delivery was unpolished, Martin was surprised to find that he sounded informed and confident when speaking French. Like a film detective. But what became increasingly clear, as his French improved, was that the longer he kept it to himself, the less likely it would be that he would be able to use it to converse with Réjean; he couldn’t just start speaking French years later. He worried he would never be able to share his love of the language and would have to carry the secret around, undivulged, just like the other thing he needed to keep Réjean from finding out.
During Réjean and Martin’s very first test drive together—a boxy but agile Chevy Fleetside—Réjean tuned the radio to the French folk station at a barely audible volume, and he and Martin headed out of town. As a rural driver, Réjean needed a test drive on rugged terrain to know whether a vehicle suited his needs. They didn’t speak or look at each other much, except when Réjean was impressed by a feat of sensitive handling or braking, and he would share a nod of appreciation with Martin, who spent nearly the entire time looking out the window, really enjoying the ride. His role as salesman was eclipsed by Réjean’s knowledge of the product. Réjean didn’t need any pitch, just the keys. As such, Martin could enjoy the plush interior and the smoothness of the suspension without having to think of things to say about them. He was, for once, completely comfortable in silence. It was this overwhelming ease that compelled him to suddenly declare, “This is nice.”
Before Martin had a chance to regret having ruined the moment, Réjean nodded and smiled.
As they got to know each other over the course of yearly visits at first, when Réjean traded in the previous year’s truck for the newest model, then increasingly frequent ones, Réjean came to appreciate Martin’s expertise in the purchase of trucks. But it was during that first test drive that Martin’s candour—his fearlessness in announcing the niceness of a moment to a complete stranger—made Réjean feel he could tell him anything. He’d never met a man so open. Réjean was also aware of Martin’s fear of and admiration for him, which made him even easier to like. The reverence shown to him by other men was never lost on Réjean, but Martin’s inability to conceal his awe compelled Réjean to gently push the limits, just to see what a little provocation could produce in someone so sincere. He had also gotten to know the finer points of Martin’s fussiness and found them funny.
On his desk, Martin had a holder for his pens that acted as a partition between himself and the person across from him. The holder contained a solid row of identical black pens, all with the clip facing left. There were other writing implements and accessories on his desk in an adjacent trough, but only the pens went in the holder. One day, when Réjean had dropped by to praise the handling of his new S-10 in a hairpin turn, he reached out and, without breaking eye contact with Martin, extracted a pen from the holder. He dawdled with it, describing the vehicle’s traction in rounding the sharp bend near the ferry landing, before placing the pen back in the holder, turning it deliberately until the clip was facing right. He sat back and shrugged.
Martin gazed back over his pen holder at Réjean, exhilarated by the provocation. He watched the amusement in Réjean’s eyes as he twisted the cap of the pen so the clip was uniformly facing left with the rest, remarking how this year Chevy had brought in a machine from Germany that tested the handling of each vehicle over one hundred and fifty times on a razor-sharp turn. Then he sat back in his chair, daring him to do it again.
That night, Martin went out and bought a bottle of Lamb’s Navy Rum in preparation for Réjean’s next visit. Thereafter, Réjean would show up unannounced, usually toward the end of the day, and they would face each other across Martin’s metal desk and have a drink—sometimes talking, sometimes not. It was nice.
NOW
Réjean had been gone for eighteen days when Agathe was hired at Stereoblast, the store selling gently used electronics in Convenience Place Mall. She tried to keep her mind off Réjean while she was at work, and had never mentioned to Tony and Wood at Stereoblast that she was married. But on the calendar at home, she counted off every day he didn’t return. He was alive, she was sure of it, somewhere else, while she was missing him—missing him under the covers of the bed, missing him huddled amid his shirts on the closet floor, missing him curled up in the driver seat of the Silverado. She sat at his chair at the kitchen table and slept on his side of the bed. Taking up his space made him a little less gone. She was walking around in his body and when she caught glimpses of herself in the mirror, Réjean’s reflection would look back. With no information whatsoever about his whereabouts, it was hard to know whether to start moving on or continue loving him in his absence. Now when she watched the door at night, she was less and less convinced he would walk through it. The belief was dying on its own, but she felt compelled to keep it alive. Because it was a kind of perverse torture, she would sneak off on her breaks from Stereoblast to visit the Big and Tall section at Hickey’s Family Apparel, where she’d bought Réjean three new shirts, every year, for twenty Christmases.
As she approached the main entrance to the mall, the crazy guy in the yellow raincoat was already holding the door open for her. She’d watched him and knew that he held out his hand for change from everyone else but her. She wondered whether it was because she looked like she didn’t have any.
Inside Hickey’s, she planted her gaze on the far wall where the sign said Men’s, undertaking the tremulous journey across the beige carpet embossed with chocolate-brown Hs. She passed the two beauty consultants in Cosmetics who at first would leap from their perches to spritz her with perfume and now only followed her lazily with their eyes. She huffed through the hosiery department, where the curvy silhouettes of calves and ankles sprouted from the tops of racks like sexy blades of grass, through the reds and blues of the Children’s section with its teeming barrel of Lego, before penetrating the Big and Tall section, located between two racks of ties. The shelves were arranged in a three-quarter circle, obscuring her from most sides so she didn’t have to pretend she was shopping.
The shirts were tidy today, the packages correctly sorted by size. Sometimes people would put them back in the wrong place, and you’d have to dig through to find the XXXL ones. Finding one felt like winning a prize. Today the XXXLs were all together at the end, a red-and-green check at the top of the stack. She would probably have bought Réjean this very shirt. Despite their triple-weave durability, a few months of vigorous wear in the woods would leave his work shirts pilled and thinning at the elbows. Réjean wore the life out of his shirts.
She sneaked her index finger through the seam in the plastic packaging, crinkling it as little as possible, until her hand could fit inside, and laid it flat over the spot where his heart would go. Her fingers lingered over to the top button of the cardboard-reinforced collar and the feeling of abandon spread out from her abdomen. She exhaled to steady herself as she unbuttoned it, careful not to make herself known. Her face slackened as she slipped completely into the illusion of Réjean’s throat, his collarbone…The softness of the flannel brought back the smell of pine chips, sweat, and aftershave that used to make her drop to her knees in the laundry room and bury her face in the mountain of plaid heaped in the basket before she surrendered it to the washing machine. So much of Réjean was left behind in his work shirts—his warmth, his breath, his flesh and bones and blood, the very himness of him. Washing his shirts used to feel like washing a little bit of him away, and left her with a mild sadness that required she smoke a cigarette.
Thinking about his sternum as she unbuttoned the next button, she unexpectedly moaned. She froze, clutching the shirt as though the two of them had been caught together. Just beyond the rack, a man primly cleared his throat.
Snatching her hand from the package, she sped from the shirt racks, nearly bowling over the nosy menswear clerk who remembered her from the days when she used to buy things.
She rummaged for her cigarettes, put one in her mouth, and had it lit before the guy in th
e yellow raincoat could open the door. She would have time for two more on the walk back to work.
Agathe stamped out her final cigarette on the ground with the hundreds of others behind the building and kicked a plastic Coca-Cola bottle, bouncing it off the curb, before climbing up into the brownout of the loading dock.
By the time she reached the staff room, Agathe’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness. She would go back to Hickey’s next week. She blew into her hands, comforted by their friendly nicotine smell, and hung her coat and scarf on a hook. From the showroom, the honk of Tony’s adoring laughter sang through the crack under the door, which meant Wood was telling a story.
“Espèce d’idiot,” she muttered as she tied on her red smock and hurried for the stick of light under the door, not wanting to miss anything.
As she entered the showroom, Tony’s posture stiffened slightly, and he acknowledged her with a nod of his already-bobbing head. Wood glanced in her direction and continued with his story.
“…and his fiancée was beautiful, you shoulda seen her. Easily ten years younger than me, but she was looking me up and down from the minute she walked in. Now, this was at a time when sound systems like this had just come out on the market and, y’know, not just everybody had one. Even in the city, only if you had serious cash did you even think of buying one of these babies. Everyone else was still listening to transistors. These things cost thousands of dollars and they were huge. Speakers up to the ceiling. If you had one, people came over to look at it as much as listen to it. So I’m showing them the model that’s most popular for young couples, within what I’ve already established is their price range without even asking, and I can tell that—one—this guy is threatened by my comfort with a big stereo and—two—he knows his girl is checking me out and feels he has something to prove.”
Wood paused for effect.
“The guy stops me in mid-pitch and asks what we have that’s a little bigger, and I see him looking at the Rebirdo TK3520. He looks from the Rebirdo to me, then back to the Rebirdo. His fiancée is looking from me to him to the stereo, back to him, back to me. I go over to the Rebirdo and lift the cover to the turntable. I check back over my shoulder at the guy. He doesn’t flinch. I lift the tone arm so gently you’da thought it was a bomb, and I lay the stylus down on the album that’s already in there, which is a Beethoven. Classy. I turn and face the two of them, and the music starts. The volume knob is only at one and the store windows are already buzzing. I go to crank it up to the next notch and I can tell the guy is scared. He can’t handle the Rebirdo. So I turn it up to two. I can see in his eyes he’s starting to panic, so I turn it up to three and the speakers are literally jumping off the floor. His fiancée isn’t looking at him anymore, only at me and the TK3520. He knows he’s lost. Without saying anything to her, he makes for the door and peels off in their station wagon. The fiancée comes over and stands right in front of me, looks me in the eye, and starts undoing my pants.”
“No way,” said Tony.
“I swear.”
“So what did you do?”
“I screwed her brains out.”
“Honk, honk. No way!”
“Lookit, that’s what it was like in those days. I was getting it all the time—we all were. Being in stereo sales was like being an astronaut. The chicks were all over you. You were literally beating them off with a stick.”
“Scusez là,” said Agathe, stepping between the two of them and reaching just past Wood’s face to a light fixture on the wall. Since she’d learned that Wood would never interrupt her cleaning, Agathe had started interrupting him by cleaning. It was the only shred of power she felt she had there. “Crissement sale, cette lampe…” she said, taking out a J Cloth from her smock and rubbing at a spot on the mounting panel. She fussed with the cloth, folding it back up, before removing her arm from in front of Wood’s face. He resumed, undeterred.
“Yep, knew what he was after the minute he walked in.”
“Yeah,” said Tony.
“Shoulda seen the guy, squealing out of the parking lot. Didn’t know what he was in for that day, nossir.”
“And you did it with his girlfriend?”
“I just said I did.”
“Wow.”
Agathe performed her own review at the same time, under her breath.
Lookit. You’da thought it was a bomb. Nossir.
Although Wood was an idiot, Agathe loved the way he talked. His stories were one of her primary means of absorbing English. She and Réjean had clung to their linguistic exclusivity as a point of honour. But without Réjean, Agathe was starting to enjoy the cowboy quality of English.
Tony and Wood had gone unnaturally silent, and Agathe looked up as the sliding-door sensor announced the arrival of a blond woman wearing a short skirt and a down-filled parka.
“Hi,” she said loudly once inside, unzipping her coat. She glanced briefly around the store before asking, “Are you guys hiring?”
Agathe froze mid-dust.
Tony and Wood blinked and said nothing.
“Whaddyou do, sell things? Fix things? Sell things.” The woman nodded.
There was a long pause, during which Agathe unintentionally took a step forward, before Wood said, “We, sell, things, that, people, bring, in, to, sell, to, us, yes.”
“I used to be a cheerleader for the Valkyries. I can sell anything.”
“…Mmn…” said Wood.
The woman laughed loudly—something between a scream and a cough—and said, “You don’t believe me?”
Wood shook his head, then nodded.
The woman laughed again. “I’m Debbie,” she said. “I’m busy this weekend, but I can start Monday. Is Monday okay?”
Wood said nothing.
“So, I’ll see you Monday,” she said.
Wood nodded.
“Wicked,” said Debbie. “You won’t regret it!” And she zipped up her parka and was gone, the sensor’s electronic tone ringing in her wake.
Agathe watched as Debbie climbed into a white Honda Civic. She could already smell its fruity, smoky interior.
“Elle commence lundi?” she said.
“Yep,” said Wood. “I think I’ll give her a shot. Seems like a nice kid.”
They stood in silence until Tony turned to Wood and said, “I think she really liked you.”
Wood Debow, Stereoblast branch manager, had been pursuing the Branch of the Year Award for a decade, and Agathe was part of his new Shiny-Makes-It-Sell strategy. The newest challenge issued by Head Office was for each branch to reduce overhead by any means possible, with rewards for the most creative ideas. Wood’s solution was darkness. He cut the electricity bill in half by installing bulbs with less than half the required wattage in some staff areas, while in others he dispensed with them altogether. Agathe locked up and ran the Shop-Vac over the industrial carpet at night by the low-pressure sodium light from the parking lot. Someone had brought in the Shop-Vac a few years ago to sell, the carpet brush bound to the end of the hose with a thickness of hockey tape. Though functional, it couldn’t be sold. The owner had left it behind nonetheless, and Wood had put it straight into the Possibility Pile outside his office. He never knew when he might need an appliance that partially worked.
In the dark, Agathe could only gauge the effectiveness of her vacuuming by sound. A gritty clicking told her something was getting sucked up the hose, but the carpet never got clean. And it didn’t matter, because Wood would never mention the carpet not getting clean, because it would mean admitting he should buy a new vacuum, which would exceed the budget. So Agathe turned on the Shop-Vac every night to move it cautiously around the floor, keeping an eye out for movement in the darkened store. The layout of the high metal shelves provided perfect concealment for murderers, and the noise of the vacuum, moreover, ensured that Agathe would never hear them sneaking up behind her until it was too late. She felt it was just a matter of time.
Around Halloween, just after Agathe had started working t
here, Wood began defining his energy-saving policy. He scanned his internal database for free things he could use for promotional purposes, shuffling options for one that could be integrated with the theme of darkness. This led him to his brother Garvey’s pest-control company. Around the fall, bats would start looking for warm places to spend the winter, and the Victorian homes in the area had big, empty attics for hibernation. Garvey got a lot of bat calls.
Wood thought darkness, he thought energy conservation, he thought daylight savings, he thought Halloween, he thought bats, he thought vermin: he thought mascot. Not only was the bat a creature of curiosity that many people didn’t get to see close-up, it also thrived in the dark. It was perfect. A bat on display was outrageous enough to get the attention of Head Office, but was also absolutely free and employed a resource whose alternative fate was release into the wild, from which no one profited.
Wood unveiled the bat one morning from beneath one of Agathe’s dusting cloths (she wondered how he knew where to find one), and Tony said “Wow” before the large-dome birdcage had been revealed.
“This little guy,” Wood announced, “is going to make us some money. I put an ad in the paper. A bat? In an electronics store? At Halloween? They’re gonna be flooding in.”
Tony reached for his hair.
Agathe craned forward to get a look. Hanging upside down from the perch was a fat brown bat with big, pointy ears. He had a swiney, pushed-in nose and bewildered eyes, which he set instantly on Agathe.
“Aie, ce n’est pas un oiseau, là,” she said.
I Am a Truck Page 3
