NOW
Agathe stood at the bus stop, lighting a cigarette with her shoulders to the wind, when the crunch of tires on gravel advanced on her suddenly. She spun around and pitched her lighter at the car in a split-second defensive move, and it bounced off the windshield of the Civic.
Debbie rolled down the window and blew out smoke. “Jesus, do you always throw things at people trying to help you?” she said. “Get in!”
Agathe grabbed her lighter and hurried to the passenger side, pausing for a moment as she lifted her foot from the cold morning roadside into the smoky pod of noise with its already familiar fragrance of Player’s Light, coconut suntan lotion, and Love’s Baby Soft.
“You live all the way out here?” said Debbie, peeling away from the shoulder. “Jesus. I’ll pick you up. You can’t be taking that bus. Don’t be crazy. You wanna smoke?”
“J’en ai,” said Agathe. She lit one and sank back into the leatherette.
The radio was playing a song about a barracuda.
“I hope you don’t mind the radio. I need to rock out to get myself right in the morning,” yelled Debbie, turning it up.
Dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduhdundun. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW!
It sounded just like a barracuda might, if it made noise. Réjean’s music didn’t do this. It didn’t sound like it was chasing you through the water.
Dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduh-dun-duhduhdundun. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWEEEEEEEWEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEW!
“Do you like Heart?” yelled Debbie.
“Oui!” yelled Agathe.
“Nancy Wilson is amazing. Listen to her, she’s like a jackhammer!”
Agathe felt loose but alert as she watched the woodland passing. This was what it sounded like in those trees, with Nancy Wilson, jackhammering. It was like she was controlling the radio, or like she was the radio. Debbie pounded her flat palm against the roof, and Agathe laughed, her eyes like two walnuts.
“Hey, are you married?” yelled Debbie.
Agathe considered lying, but decided not to. “Mon mari…” she yelled after a brief hesitation, then paused again long enough that Debbie looked over and turned down Heart. “Mon mari, Réjean, y…y left me,” she said, thinking it was about time to admit the truth.
“What?” said Debbie. “How stupid was he?”
Agathe looked at the dirty pants protector under her feet.
“Ben, c’est compliqué.”
“How long were you married?”
“Vingt ans.”
“And he just picked up and left?”
“Ben…” said Agathe, “c’est compliqué.”
She dug out her wallet and held it open to the picture of the two of them on their wedding day.
“Jesus Christ,” said Debbie, swerving out of the lane, then back into it, her neck bent to Agathe’s wallet. “Look at him!”
Debbie was no longer watching the road.
“Wow,” she said, “I don’t mean to rub it in, but…wow.” She reached for the wallet and held it in front of her on the steering wheel. “He’s massive,” she said, and looked up at Agathe. “No, I’m sorry, I’m not even gonna ask. It’s vulgar…”
“C’était énorme,” Agathe wistfully assured her.
Debbie nodded appreciatively, still looking at the picture. “I’ve never been married,” she said, handing the wallet back. “I’ve only fallen in love once and never again. Not since Dale.”
“Ah oui?”
“We met when we were nineteen, and were together for like five years. I don’t know if you want to hear this right now.”
“Ben sûr,” said Agathe.
“Well, it was perfect. It was a perfect love. We were like the same person. We even had the same hair. Dale would try on my clothes and put on my makeup, and I can’t even tell you how much fun that was. Dale was the one who told me I should try out for the Valkyries. He said I was the best dancer he’d ever seen. And I went to every one of Roxxxlyde’s shows—that was his band—and screamed my head off. We both really wanted each other to succeed.”
Success for Dale was self-evident, consisting only of rock-and-roll stardom, while Debbie imagined herself standing at a podium in a gown, accepting an award—she just hadn’t yet decided what for.
“Et alors?” said Agathe.
“Well,” said Debbie, “this is going to sound weird, but…I had to break up with him because of Peter Frampton. This producer came to see the guys play at an all-ages club and signed them that night. From the second they signed that contract, Dale was famous. It was so fast. You don’t realize how fast it can be when there’s someone there, ready to make money off you. He was setting up a tour for them—like, to the States—and that’s when I was like, okay, there were gonna be a lot of girls falling in love with Dale, throwing their panties…Dale was hot. A guy like that just can’t have an old lady. I knew that. When I was listening to Frampton Comes Alive! lying on the floor of my bedroom, no one even had to tell me that Peter Frampton had a wife. I just knew. I knew that he wrote all those songs for her, not me, and it sort of ruined the experience, to be honest. For me and for Peter. I mean, I’ll always love Frampton, and that album, but I really felt—I really felt—that Dale deserved to have all those girls feel the way I felt about Frampton. I didn’t want to deprive him of that. But it was mostly, honestly, for those girls. They had every right to believe that he could love them back. I mean, it’s rock and roll.” Debbie crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “So I let him go.”
“Ouaou…” said Agathe.
“Now he does community theatre,” Debbie said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He’s got a wife and two kids and they live in the suburbs, and I do my thing.”
Debbie’s thing was a gentle “Aw, hon, that’s okay,” for any man who showed interest. The guy would come away feeling apologetic, grateful, and unsure of whether or not he’d just tried to ask her out. It was a good trick.
Agathe could only shake her head. “Let ’im go…” she said.
They drove in silence for a time.
“Was it sort of a relief?” asked Debbie.
“Comment?”
“I mean, I could see it being a relief, when your husband left. Because you’d be free. Some people find it a drag to have someone around all the time…”
“Non,” said Agathe. “Non, it wasn’t.” She was finished talking about Réjean. “Hoos this?” she asked, turning up the radio on a sly, purring voice telling them to bang a gong.
“Oh,” said Debbie. “Oh, now this—” she lit another cigarette—“this is T-Rex.” She lifted her chin heavenward, as though T-Rex was in the sky. “Just listen.” They listened. “And that is Marc Bolan. Have you ever heard anything so perfect?” Debbie dipped her head reverently, and said with a kind of wonder, “Did you know that Marc Bolan was so tiny you could fit him in a dollhouse?”
She told Agathe about the children of the Beltane Wood and Marc Bolan’s amazing jumpsuits all the way to Dingwall’s Donuts.
“His death was the greatest tragedy in the history of…in history,” she said, pulling up to the drive-thru speaker, “but it doesn’t mean he and I can’t still be in love. And I happen to know for a fact he can still feel my love, all the way from the forest of Beltane.”
In addition to needing the radio to get her started in the morning, Debbie also needed a large tea from Dingwall’s, with cream, bag in—just as Agathe took hers. This became a ritual that Agathe would begin to look forward to, much in the way she suspected Debbie looked forward to loudly saying the words bag in into the drive-thru speaker. As they waited to drive up to the pickup window, Debbie turned up the radio and said, “Aw, listen to Bruce.”
A guitar came together with a drum and what sounded like one of every other instrument, each playing one note or hitting one beat, together, in an important cascade as it walked down a staircase to a cl
iff-hanging smash that resonated for just long enough that it didn’t seem to have anything left. Then: two-three-four.
The highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive, everyone was out on the run, and there was nowhere left to hide. Bruce’s voice bled with abandon, like he had tried everything and couldn’t think of a better plan.
“He’s so frustrated,” said Debbie. “He wants something new and he doesn’t know what, he just knows it’s out there somewhere and he needs to get Wendy and get out of that town before it crushes them both. Listen to him. No one understands desperation like Bruce. And no one understands hope like Bruce. And he’s got my favourite ass.”
She passed over Agathe’s tea and pulled them into a parking spot to listen to the rest of the song. Debbie closed her eyes and raised her fist, singing along with Bruce about walking in the sun. Agathe closed her eyes, too, and nodded along. When the song was almost over, she peeped through one eye at Debbie, who still had both of hers closed.
When she opened them, she said, “Hey, why don’t you drive? You don’t have a car?”
“Ah,” said Agathe, “Ché pas comment.”
“You never learned?”
“Non, c’était Réjean qui faisait le driving.”
Debbie pulled out of the drive-thru and into the adjoining pharmacy’s empty parking lot. She took off her seat belt. “Get behind the wheel. You need to know how. You can’t just not know how.”
Juste comme ça. No one had ever offered to show her. But she had watched Réjean go through the driving motions like a dance so many times she almost knew how.
Debbie took her through the positions of the gearshift.
“Now you have to be firm, but gentle,” said Debbie, making a stroking gesture on the handle of the stick. “The knob is the most important part,” she said, further caressing it. After a few more jerking and stroking motions to make her point, she went through the gears.
“Okay, so these are the positions: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and reverse. Remember, the clutch lets you change them; when you forget the clutch, you grind the gears. I always find it funny when people say that, ‘Y’know what grinds my gears?’ Anyway, now you’ll know why they say that. Because it’s so irritating. And it’s bad for the car.”
Agathe mentally shifted through the gears, her head following their pattern.
“Okay, now press the clutch, and pull the stick from neutral to the one position.”
Agathe did, and the Civic started to move forward. She brought her foot down on the gas, ready to make it go faster, grinding the gears.
“Oooooooooh, you wanna go fast, eh?” said Debbie.
After a few more jerky tries, and practising the fineries of releasing the clutch, Agathe did a circle of the empty lot, hand over hand. Debbie, banging her palm on the ceiling, bellowed, “Yes! YEEEEEEEEEEEES!! Now stroke the knob, and shift up! SHIFT UP!!”
She must have been a terrific cheerleader.
From then on, Debbie insisted that Agathe drive in the mornings, both because she needed to learn and because Debbie loved being chauffeured. She would shout encouragement from the passenger seat as she put on her makeup in the visor mirror.
“You were born to drive. Lookit you!”
Agathe couldn’t believe she’d ever let someone else do all the driving. Réjean made so much more sense now. She understood how much of his general happiness came from operating a vehicle. What surprised her, once she’d broken the 110- kilometre speed limit on the highway, was Réjean’s ability to maintain a reasonable speed. He’d always been such a cautious driver, whereas Agathe got impatient when she and Debbie would hit a red light, and was disappointed every time they reached their destination. She got a chill of excitement whenever a transport truck flew by. Those trucks gave her a feeling, way up there. Like they ran things.
Agathe and Debbie stood on the loading dock on a Friday afternoon, smoking a second cigarette.
“Any plans for the weekend?” asked Debbie.
Agathe snorted and shook her head. “Non.”
“Do you do anything for fun? Jesus!”
Agathe felt she could tell Debbie anything, but still knew better than to mention Sondage.
“Okay. Tonight, we go out. Rip this town a new one.”
Agathe rode on anticipation for the rest of the day, occasionally stealing excited glances at Debbie.
Between repairing and selling merchandise, Debbie was the best business plan Stereoblast had ever had. Whereas Tony, when the store wasn’t busy, performed cleaning tasks like grouping things in threes, Debbie was productive nearly all the time, and had increased revenue by thirty-eight percent. She had outsold herself that afternoon, and when Wood locked the door after the last customer, he turned to her and said, “Lookit. Tony and me, Tony and I are gonna…y’know…celebrate. Can we…beer?
“Aw, hon, that’s okay,” said Debbie with a deep tilt of her head.
Wood apologized, and Tony led him out the front doors.
Debbie turned to Agathe, shook her hair, gave a loud “WOOOO!” and threw her purse over her shoulder. “C’mon,” Debbie barked. “Let’s go get loaded!”
In the Civic, the radio played a song about a lady with the night in her veins.
“Ooh,” said Debbie, and turned it up, “This is the Pretenders. This one’s dirty, you’ll like this. That’s Chrissie Hynde. Listen to her.”
Agathe brought her face closer to the steering wheel as she watched the beautiful road.
“So she’s super horny, and when she’s talking about the night being inside her, what she really means is that this guy is inside her—or maybe she really is talking about the night. Anyway, it’s super hot. Here, he’s got his chest on her back cross a new Cadillac. Like, what a dirty thing to say. It’s so dirty.”
They listened to Chrissie Hynde and her dirty song.
“Chrissie can do anything she wants,” Debbie yelled. “She plays guitar and sings and plays the harmonica, and has these amazing bangs. She just holds the whole thing together—listen to her. The rest of the Pretenders are guys too—helping her sing this song about screwing this guy. God…”
In the crowded parking lot at the Whisky Mak, Debbie fluffed up her hair and reached down the neckline of her sweater into each armpit to pull up a handful of speckled bosom. Agathe tugged her track suit top down over her mid-section and stood with her hands on her hips, watching as Debbie applied lip gloss, punctuating with a pouty smack. When Debbie flung open the red doors of the Whisky Mak, it was as though revealing herself at last to a crowd that had bought tickets to see her.
The sudden blare of the music hit Agathe like a wave. They had been listening to rock and roll at work and in the car since Debbie started, but never at this volume, filling a room this size, getting into every pore. It filled her up in a way that awakened all her nerves and made her stand taller. Rock and roll had a way of putting itself on you, so that you were wearing whatever was being sung. All the abandon and rage and torment and heartache. Everyone here was wearing it. Réjean’s music didn’t do this.
A sharp pain jabbed her heart as she thought of those sweet Acadian songs. One hundred and ninety-eight days he’d been gone, and nothing Agathe could do would bring him back.
She forced her eyes open and turned her attention to the Thin Lizzie song now playing. She and Debbie had talked about this one, and she liked the feeling of menace about it, that the boys were coming back into town and if they wanted to fight, you’d better let ’em. The song put itself on Agathe, and she became part of the menace. Réjean’s face slipped from her thoughts.
Debbie turned with a flip of her hair and said, “This is Thin Lizzie.”
“Hi know!” yelled Agathe.
Debbie beckoned her up to the bar, where she shouted that they would get faster service. There were two empty stools there, one of which was being leaned against by a thick young man in a long black coat and glasses. Debbie turned back to Agathe and poked her chin into
the air. She nudged her breasts between the young man and his skinny companion.
“You boys saving this seat for anyone special?”
“No, I was just leaning on that stool. It’s not officially occupied. You may sit on it.”
“Well, thank you,” said Debbie. “Looks like someone’s momma raised him right. Whaddya have, Agathe?” Debbie asked, turning her head partway around.
Agathe shrugged. “Ché pas, là.”
A moment later, two brown bottles of Alpine were deposited on the counter in front of Debbie, who passed one to Agathe. They clinked them together and each took a long swig.
“So this is Agathe. We work at the Stereoblast over at Convenience Place. Whaddyou guys do? Fix computers or what?”
“Actually, we create the programs that run the computers. We’re programmers.”
Debbie turned to Agathe. “I’m sorry, I have to do some networking here.”
Agathe took another swig of beer, then another. She wasn’t interested in talking to the computer guys. She had never used a computer. More importantly, she had never sat in a bar where rock and roll changed her physical being. She let the music envelop her again and took a long look around. People shouted at each other, bringing mouths to ears and ears to mouths. There were other women there dressed like Debbie. There were men together, looking at women and women together, looking at men. Two women caught Agathe’s eye. They sat on the opposite side of the U-shaped bar, a few seats down from each other. One woman wore a purple sweater with a fur collar and looked straight ahead as though listening politely to someone who wasn’t there. The other woman wore a professional blouse, like a secretary. She was reading a book, occasionally writing in the margins, smoking. From time to time, she would close her book and take a long sip of an amber-coloured drink. Agathe wondered whether the two women knew each other.
She turned away from Debbie and the computer guys and pretended she was one of these women, like the three of them were members of a club. She took a few more sips of her beer, trying to look nonchalant.
I Am a Truck Page 7
