“Agathe,” he said. He’d never spoken her name out loud, and realized that all this time he’d only referred to her with Réjean as “your wife.”
Every so often her shoulders would lift and her head and neck would wrench forward in a froggy sort of way, like she was forcing her eyes open. She put out her cigarette, downed whatever was in her cup, and put on her coat. Martin held his breath as she opened the door and passed him in the trees, heading for the road.
Martin slunk down the drive and saw her stand at the bus stop. He followed her all day as she put up posters of Réjean, and showed their wedding photo to strangers, asking if they’d seen him. At night, once Martin saw her safely in the house, he crept back down to the road and slept in his truck. He could think of no other place he wanted to be.
When his eyes flicked open, Martin oriented himself immediately and remembered why he was sleeping in the truck. He crept back up to the window of the kitchen where Agathe was again at the table, smoking and drinking tea, about to make her way down to the bus stop.
Martin never returned to work. Not only did he feel tethered to Agathe for reasons he couldn’t explain, but the idea of spending a day selling cars to strangers now seemed absurd. He couldn’t believe he had been doing it all this time. After three months, bills would pile up on his untended doorstep and his landlady would call again and again, hoping he was okay. She would hold his apartment for those three months out of gratitude for his expert recommendation of her Chevy Cavalier, until she was forced to rent the apartment to a new tenant and put his belongings out on the street.
One day, Martin followed Agathe to Convenience Place Mall, where she often put up posters and asked people about having seen Réjean. But on this day, she walked in to Stereoblast and stayed there for over an hour. When she didn’t come out, Martin wondered if she had left without his noticing. He hadn’t seen anyone come or go, and despite his discomfort, he decided to go in and check.
The song of the door sensor and the sight of her in a real-life tableau with other humans stopped Martin in his tracks. She was holding a bucket full of brightly coloured rags in one hand and a yellow feather duster in the other. Two men stood with her, an older one in a shirt and tie and a younger one with a round, curly helmet of hair. They all looked up when he walked in, leaving him frozen at the door. He lowered the brim of his hat and moved to the nearest rack, displaying hot curler sets and other hair-styling appliances.
The older man continued to Agathe, “We figure, people come in, they see you cleaning, they know we really care about quality. You seem pretty serious, and that’s good. ‘Stereoblast: we’re serious about quality.’”
The curly-haired man laughed and twirled a lock of his hair on his finger. “Good one,” he said, nodding.
Agathe smiled stiffly.
“Serious about quality,” said Wood.
“Yeah,” said Tony.
“When we opened up in ’83, you should have seen the place. Just a few display cases and some modular shelving. Now, look at these walls. What do you see?”
When no one answered, the curly-haired guy said, “Gently used appliances and electronics?”
“Yeah, but what do they hang on?”
“Hooks!”
“Okay, but where do you hang the hooks?”
“The walls?”
“Right, but what’s covering the walls?”
“Gently used…”
“Pegboard, Tony. It takes a managerial eye to see that. The walls are covered in holes, every hole can support a hook, every hook can hang a piece of merchandise. Know why? Coz Carl Turcott, Mr. Stereoblast himself, calls me up one day and says, ‘Debow, I’ve seen your numbers. I’ve seen how that store is going and I like it. Tell you what, I’m thinking we double the volume of that place.’ You know why he said that?”
“Why,” asked Tony.
“Coz he knew I could handle it. You don’t give a man perforated pegboard walls, you don’t think he can sell what’s hanging on ’em. And I can sell what’s hanging on ’em. Which is why he called.”
Agathe was deeply lost in thought, fluffing gently at the air with her yellow duster.
She emerged at the end of the day, and Martin followed her bus home. He repeated the trip, tailing her to her job the next day and every day thereafter without question. For reasons he still didn’t understand, he could not leave her alone.
What he had gained by ducking out of the world was a newfound dryness. Sitting inside his home of foul-weather gear, he would lightly flutter his arms to feel the way the air passing through no longer chilled the wet parts of him, but simply breezed along his sides as though rustling through dead grass.
He was becoming increasingly resourceful with respect to his own survival, learning how to use newspaper to cushion and cover his sleep. Mealtimes, or the times when his emptiness was too painful to ignore, he would go through the Dumpsters at Convenience Place, find the thing that smelled least awful, and stuff down enough of it to satisfy the shrinking space in his abdomen.
At four in the afternoon, Colpitt’s Grocery dumped the day’s unsellable produce, and Dingwall’s Donuts put out the stale pastries just after nine, when they closed. Even though it was during his evening watch, Martin would race back to the mall for the Dingwall’s deposit. The value of the soft, pastry-filled garbage bag was worth the risk; it not only smelled good and served Martin for several meals, but was also good to sleep on. He dreamed of eclairs.
While he was able to handle food and shelter on his own, he still needed money for gas to follow Agathe to and from work. The day Martin spent his last cent on gas, he parked the Ranger at Convenience Place, stepped down, and crossed the parking lot to the front doors, where he stood until a man approached. When the man got near enough, Martin opened the door and held out his hand. The man looked surprised, but rummaged in his pocket, came up with some loose change, and dropped it into Martin’s palm. Martin nodded and pocketed the change. Effortless.
The mall had no other panhandlers, so Martin had the market cornered, although he was making more money than he intended. He would stretch out to sleep on the front seat of the Ranger and coins poured out of his pockets.
Inevitably, he one day found himself holding the door for Agathe. He had been watching her approach from under the brim of his hat, not sure what to do when she reached him. He didn’t want her money. He opened the door without putting out his hand, hoping she would walk on, but she stopped and dug in her purse, pulled out a loonie and handed it to him. Still concealed by his hat, he shook his head. She stood solid, loonie extended. Martin took a step back.
“Décide-toi, là,” she said, pocketing the coin and walking on. Now every time she passed through the door, she ignored him and he nodded, glad she didn’t insist.
They continued this manoeuvre as though they had decided on it together, until the blond woman with the big blue parka got hired at Stereoblast, and things changed. She and Agathe were driving to work together—Agathe was driving them to work in the Honda Civic. She no longer took her breaks at Hickey’s. She spent a lot of time with the blond woman now, smoking on the loading dock, talking, and laughing. Raucously. Agathe laughed a lot.
Friday night, as Martin was waiting for Agathe to finish the vacuuming, she and the blond woman suddenly ran out the door and jumped into the Civic, as though escaping from captivity. Martin threw the Ranger into gear and pulled out behind them, trying to keep a suitable distance between the two vehicles. The Civic pulled into the parking lot of a roadhouse, and Martin followed them through the door into the pulsing room. Locked in the crowd, he couldn’t move of his own free will in any direction, only where the crowd took him. He abandoned himself to the tide, but kept the halo of the blond woman’s hair in sight as a beacon.
A man nudged him against the current of bodies, and with friendly recognition, said, “Hey.” Martin tried to place him as the man was reabsorbed by the wall of people. He didn’t know him. Other people occasionally showed
signs of recognition as well. It took him some time to understand that he had opened the door for them. He lowered his hat, believing it made him less conspicuous.
He watched as the blond woman finagled seats at the bar from two young men and struck up a conversation with them while Agathe let her eyes linger where they landed. She seemed to be sitting up straighter.
As the loud song playing died down, there was a change in the air. The banging and shouting was taken over by a tinkling electronic piano, and couples started filtering off toward the dance floor. As the flow propelled him toward the back of the room, he spotted a man sitting all by himself at a table in an alcove. Though it was dark, he could make out the outline of the man’s square-brimmed military cap and a long, aquiline nose. He wouldn’t have looked twice had the man not begun shouting to an imaginary foe. Martin looked harder now. The man was wearing a set of military fatigues, and seemed to be watching Agathe.
Agathe took a sip of beer and closed her eyes with what looked like relief. She appeared uncharacteristically at home.
When Martin checked back to where the man sat, he found him turned so he was facing Agathe, shouting at her. When the music got a little louder, the man pointed at her and shouted even louder, using the muscles in his face. Fear flooded Martin’s whole body as the pieces dropped into place. This was the man from the Lobster Shack Réjean had told him about. This man wanted to hurt Agathe. He was threatening her right now, and was so close he could walk right across the bar and touch her. Martin patted his pocket for the Colonel’s gun. Agathe couldn’t know the danger sitting so close by, but she seemed to be watching him from behind the blond woman’s hair. Martin readied himself by clenching and unclenching his fists. She was definitely looking; in fact, she was sneaking looks.
The man was getting agitated and shaking his fist. Who knew how crazy he might get? Why were people not fleeing? Martin reached his hand slowly inside his pocket flap, his eyes never leaving the man’s face, and he began to notice symmetry between the man’s babbling and the music playing. Agathe was equally rapt. No. She was more than that. It was like they were aware of each other. It was when he pointed again at Agathe that Martin’s mind emptied like an hourglass and he watched, slack-mouthed.
Baybay-eeyay-eeyayay, oo I get chills when I’m with you, ohwhoawhoa ohwhoawhoa.
They were aware of each other. The man was. Singing. To her.
The wind drained from Martin’s lungs as he gathered the information. Of course. Looking on now that he knew the man wasn’t crazy, what struck Martin most of all, aside from his emotional commitment to his performance, was that he clearly didn’t give a single thought to what other people thought of him. The man had probably never broken a sweat.
“Hey, Crazy Yellow Guy! No way!” said the blond woman, craning her neck just past Agathe.
Martin suddenly felt painfully embarrassed. He was not only unneeded, he was also unwanted, or he would be if either Agathe or the army man knew he was there. Which they didn’t. Because no one cared whether he was there or not. His face burned.
Martin looked at the man one last time as the couples returned to their tables. Just before they obscured him like a curtain, the man gulped down the rest of his beer and slipped through the crowd to the door.
Martin couldn’t help himself now. Knowing that Agathe was in no danger, he followed the man out to the parking lot, holding back to let him cover some distance before following. The army man buttoned his coat and rifled in his pocket for his keys, climbing into a Ford F-100. When Martin got close enough to the truck to see through the half-open window, he stopped. The man was putting the key in the ignition, laughing to himself. Spotting Martin so close, so clearly looking, he stuck his head out the window and said, “Crazy Yellow Guy! Can I help you, brother?”
Martin said, “You were…singing to a woman in there.”
The man laughed. “Yeah,” he said.
Helplessly awed, Martin said, “Do you…Do you know her?”
“Naw,” he said. “Naw, not really. But, I don’t know. She’s the only one who noticed me in there, and it’s fun to have somebody to sing to.” He looked seriously at Martin. “I love to sing, man.”
Martin nodded, dumbfounded.
“I’ll tell you, though, it was a stupid thing to do. Her boyfriend is huge. I’m lucky he wasn’t there, or I’d be dead.” He laughed again. “That guy wants to kill me.”
As he watched the man drive away, Martin acknowledged that somewhere in his heart, through the loss and obscurity, he knew Agathe didn’t need him. And somewhere in there, he didn’t care. But when he got the full impact of his irrelevance, it became all-consuming. He felt ill-formed. Amorphous. He was a ghost, a coward, and a rotten friend—the only area in which he had ever really wanted to excel. It was too much to think about.
He drove back to the mall and parked out by the Dumpsters. Right on time, the Dingwall’s manager brought out the stale-pastry bag. Martin hefted it from the bin to the Ranger and placed it on the passenger seat. He untied the top and pulled out an apple fritter, then dropped it back in the bag. The emptiness inside him no longer felt like a space that needed filling, but like a depleted granary with only the remaining chaff waiting to be swept out. He tied the bag and pushed the top down with his hand. The air whistled out like a slow, sad song.
Agathe waved the bus on as it passed her at the stop. As she watched for Debbie, she squinted, waiting for the gleaming white Civic to burst through the grey around it. Debbie was late. Normally, Agathe could hear the Civic coming, and now listened carefully. When the Civic finally did appear, it didn’t announce itself at all. Debbie was also unusually quiet when she slid out of the driver side to let Agathe in. Agathe noticed that T-Rex was playing, and she turned it up. But Debbie only half-smiled, which seemed to be for Agathe’s benefit.
“C’est le petit,” said Agathe.
Debbie didn’t respond.
“Y’a-t-il quelque chose?” Agathe asked, her hand anticipatorily poised on the gearshift.
Debbie clicked her tongue. “Aw, hon,” she said. “I applied for a job with the company Blaine and Sebastian work for, and just found out last night that I got it.”
“Ah!” said Agathe.
“It’s in the city,” said Debbie.
“Ah,” said Agathe.
Blaine and Sebastian from the Whisky Mak hadn’t realized they were teaching Debbie Visual Basic until she was sitting on a kitchen chair drinking Baileys in Sebastian’s bedroom, and taking notes. Every night she would show up unannounced, but overwhelmingly welcome. She got herself certified, and when an entry-level position opened up at the software company where Blaine and Sebastian worked, Debbie marched in for the interview and marched out their first-ever female computer programmer.
“I start in a couple of weeks,” said Debbie, “but I have to move. I’m going to tell Wood this morning.” She paused. “I have to start packing and looking for a place, so this’ll probably be my last day.”
Agathe knew that Debbie had been learning about computer programming for the past few months, but she hadn’t stopped to wonder why anyone would learn a skill in order to keep working at Stereoblast.
“Dans la ville,” said Agathe.
“Yeah,” said Debbie.
Agathe concertedly shifted the car into gear and pulled onto the road, waiting for the acceleration to lift her spirits. When it didn’t, she went faster.
“On va au drive-thru?” she asked, pulling into the passing lane.
“Hell, yeah,” said Debbie.
Agathe passed every car on the way to Dingwall’s, carrying on a battle inside her head. She didn’t want to want Debbie to stay, and if there was one thing she was learning, it was that sometimes people went away, and that being sad about it made no difference. Pushing forward was the only option. It wasn’t as though she wanted Debbie to keep working at Stereoblast; she wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
“Deux gros thé avec crème,” said Agathe into the driv
e-thru speaker.
“Bag in!” shouted Debbie from the passenger seat, stuffing a bill into Agathe’s hand. Agathe was too sad to fight.
Back on the road, Debbie said, “I don’t know, Agathe, this town…”
“C’est un town full of losers.”
“That’s right,” Debbie laughed. “I’m pullin’ outta here to win.”
“Pullin’ outta here to win…” said Agathe to the dashboard.
“You know,” said Debbie. “Bruce is just saying what he knows we all feel. About needing something new. There’s so much stuff out there, and we only get to see the tiniest bit of it. It’s right to want more.” She paused. “Coz maybe tomorrow the good lord’ll take you away.” She sipped her tea and lit a cigarette. “You know, you might like the city. Have you ever even been there? There’s rock-and-roll shows all the time. I can get you a job. We can go see the Pretenders.”
Agathe nodded, knowing she was staying right here.
“You know it’s never too late. It’s never too late for anything. I mean, how much longer can you really wait for him to come back?”
“Ché pas…” Agathe said, knowing that she did. “Ché pas…E could come home asoir.” She turned to see if she had convinced Debbie.
She knew could just go. She and Debbie could go see the Pretenders. But she also knew in her fort intérieur she wasn’t finished here, and that only she would know when it was time. Point final.
“Ben, félicitations, ton job,” said Agathe. “C’est excitant.”
“I’m gonna miss you,” said Debbie.
“Oui,” said Agathe. “I’m gonna miss you, too.”
Without meaning to, Réjean had started growing a long, blunt beard. No one said anything about it, it just happened. As he eased into a life working for the Colonel, Réjean gradually stopped wondering what he was missing in the life he’d left. He was learning the intricacies of cheese and wine, and spending large parts of his day intimidating people. Not only did he enjoy the work, but he was really improving productivity. He had streamlined the pickup process, earning the respect of JC, who would laugh the whole way back to the truck every time they left a client’s shop.
I Am a Truck Page 10
