Martin was quick to pick up gin rummy and they began playing endlessly. It provided some structure for their time together. Agathe played the battery-powered radio, and every time the room hummed with something unsaid, she would tell him what was on.
“Aerosmith, ça.”
Within a few days, Martin was walking around and helping Agathe in the kitchen. He cleaned every dish she used, arranged the glassware according to height, and dusted the knick-knacks.
When the ice began to melt and the town emerged, hands on hips, many homes remained without power, but Stereoblast was back up and running right away. Agathe left Martin with a refrigerator full of leftovers and went reluctantly back to work.
There was no denying that things just weren’t the same without Debbie. The coffee tasted thin and bitter, and Tony couldn’t remember if he had put in new coffee or just run water through the grounds from seven days ago. Wood took his coffee down to his office, where he sat all day devising strategies to compensate for the lost revenue caused by the storm and Debbie’s departure, leaving Tony in the showroom to quietly contemplate the components she had fixed. He thought of her capable hands and the commission he would make selling those items, which he didn’t feel was right. Debbie had shown them a new way for Stereoblast, a brighter way, and now they were left with only her shadow.
When Agathe approached Tony from the backroom, she could feel it: the pull of sadness. She went directly to one of the stereos and turned it on. Cheap Trick wanted her to want them. Tony nodded yes to Cheap Trick.
The two of them listened to the radio all day, playing songs that reminded them of Debbie, and not a single customer came through the doors. At five o’clock, Tony took the untouched till down to Wood, who told him to go on ahead, he had some things to finish downstairs. Tony tried to smile as he passed Agathe.
“Tomorrow’ll be better,” he said.
“Ouah, ben sûr,” she said.
Wood chose to stay late. Agathe had planned to skip the vacuuming, but with him sitting downstairs she would have to. Stupid Wood. She cranked the volume on the radio. It played what sounded like a medley of different guitar parts all belonging to different songs, and she knew right away it was Kansas and their wayward son. Agathe only knew the chorus, but she shouted along as she jerked the vacuum hose carelessly across the floor, deaf to the sensor on the sliding door that she hadn’t bothered to lock—and to the sound of JC and Réjean locking it behind them from the inside.
As a man with agricultural interests, the Colonel kept meticulously abreast of weather trends, and consulted the Farmer’s Almanac every season to find out what preparations to make for his grapes. He had known about the storm months in advance and had made arrangements for the crops, as well as all temperature-sensitive areas of the compound that accommodated the fragile storage and aging needs of cheeses and wines. In the fall, he had assigned the task to JC of buying up every reasonably priced space heater he could find. Four of the heaters were set up in the Pinot Noir quadrant of the greenhouse, an extremely delicate grape, and the one upon which the Colonel had staked his reputation. He had buyers lining up seasons in advance for crates of his Pinot Noir.
JC had bought those four heaters at Stereoblast. Tony had started the sale, suggesting the two working heaters in the showroom. When Wood, eavesdropping nearby, overheard the details, he thought of the Possibility Pile, and stepped in. The heaters Wood had been hoarding in the Possibility Pile made noise when you turned them on, but produced no heat. Wood sold them to JC nonetheless, and they had been responsible for the loss of an entire crop of grapes.
JC waved to Réjean, poked a finger into his own chest, then pointed it down the stairs, making a pair of walking legs with his index and middle fingers. He pointed at Réjean, then at the floor. Réjean pointed wide-eyed at Agathe, whose back remained to them, and JC replied by making a zipping motion against his lips, then disappeared along the wall and out of sight down the stairs.
Agathe vacuumed vigorously. “Carray hon,” she yelled.
Réjean assumed a position behind her like a goalie, trying to skirt her line of vision, but there was no rhyme or reason to her aim of the duct-taped hose. She faked him out a few times as he tried his best to remain out of sight.
Réjean hadn’t laid a hand on anyone since the cheese idiot’s death. At night, he dreamed he was a monster, stomping on houses, destroying towns for no reason. In these dreams, he saw screaming peasants in typical scenes of storybook destruction, but also the greater human detail of the damage he had wrought: the orphans, widows, terror, grief, and inconvenience of disaster. He would wake up wanting to flee from himself. His guilt had begun affecting his dealings with the Colonel and the other men. No one could get near him. And now, the possibility of hurting the woman in the electronics store was making him sweaty and feverish.
Through the noise of vacuum and radio, Agathe’s intuition sent her a signal. She stiffened, ears cocked, and Réjean braced himself against the wall. He had been detected. He dove to the right as she spun around to her left. She spun to her right and he leaped to her left. He could feel her fear and knew she was going to scream, and so with no alternative, he threw an arm around her middle and another around her face, covering her mouth. She writhed wildly, forcing him to tighten his grip, filling him with dread.
Agathe could feel the mossy softness of his beard tickling the top of her head. With her nose free for breathing, she inhaled deeply and her senses sounded the alarm. From the hand over her mouth came a scent that created a stampede in her guts and pierced her heart. She began to hyperventilate and fought with everything she had, all elbows, grunting and raging beneath the giant hand, trying to get a look. It was him. It was him.
Réjean was queasy with the violence of just holding her, but now that she was struggling and he had to squeeze the globe of her upper half close enough to smell her Craven As, he realized with horror what was happening to him. He was getting an erection. Not just any erection, but an unruly one, jutting and huge, demanding to be known. He squirmed sideways to keep it from poking into her. She continued to writhe with every ounce of her strength, arms and legs flailing, forcing him to hold her tighter, picking her up just off the floor so that her feet dangled. He breathed through his mouth to keep from being sick. There was more fight in her than he could ever have guessed. She started to kick and bite, refusing defeat, and Réjean, unable to keep up with the sheer force of her resistance, shook her free onto the floor.
She gaped up at him with the whites of her eyes showing. It was him. Under the inexplicable beard, his perfect face, his eyes, the cheeks she had kissed millions of times, and the hair that curled around the backs of his ears. It was him. She beamed back at him, but nothing in his face, in his big, soft brows, in his deep, black eyes, told her he knew her. Instead, they told her of apprehension. When he turned his back on her to adjust his pants, she threw herself on him.
“Réjean, Réjean,” she cried, kissing him and pulling him closer.
He grabbed her wrists, the force of his restraint making him queasier, and held her up in front of him as she panted and made strange, dovelike noises. His eyes explored her face. He didn’t know her.
“Réjean,” she said again, losing strength. “Réjean, Réjean, Réjean.”
The relief of touching him, looking at him, completely alive before her, made her want to sob hot, heavy tears, to melt into him and absorb his strength the way she had the first time she lay her hands on him. Instead, she collapsed into his chest, wheezing, sockets dry.
Réjean was convinced to go home with Agathe mostly through his shame at having manhandled her in the store and his inability to follow her frenzied explanation of their life together. All the way home, Agathe fought the urge to pull the Silverado over to the side of the road and dive on top of him. His distracted stare held her at bay. Since the Silverado hadn’t sparked anything for Réjean, Agathe turned on the French folk station at a nearly audible volume, but he didn’t notice. Tes
ting him, she tuned the radio to her usual station, and the song about girls with fat bottoms was playing. So she turned it up just a little, and a sourness spread across Réjean’s face. He looked at her quizzically as she nodded her head to the rhythm.
“Freddie Mercury, ça,” she said.
He turned toward the window and rested his head against the frame.
When they pulled into the driveway and their home appeared in the clearing, she checked him again. As he took in the little cottage through the window, a look of disbelief crossed his face, followed by a frown.
Martin was in the kitchen, setting the table for dinner. “Fourchette, couteau, fourchette,” he mused as he flanked the dinner plates. When Réjean ducked his head through the front door, Martin froze, the final couteau clutched in his petrified fist. Seeing Réjean alive, his first impulse was to scream or cry, but as the moment stretched on, he caught the hint of difference in Réjean. He wasn’t looking at Martin at all, but glancing disappointedly around the kitchen. Only when Agathe introduced them did he realize that not only did Réjean not know him, he was unfamiliar with the sound of his own name.
Agathe led Réjean from room to room, hoping one of them would set something off in his memory, as Martin, still holding a butter knife in the kitchen, felt a trickle of sweat roll down his side. Truth had become mercurial with Martin as its custodian, and Réjean’s memory threatened to connect the dots of reality. So many times while he and Agathe had sat playing cards he thought of telling her the truth. If he was going to say something, now was the time. Or was it? He vowed to give it some more thought and come up with a better moment. But he would tell them. It was the right thing to do. For now, he watched as Agathe clicked the lights on and off in each room, the big plaid shirt growing damp around him.
Over the next week, Réjean stayed on for the possibility of something triggering his memory. He and Martin spent the days playing gin rummy while Agathe was at work, Réjean trying to picture what the Colonel and the guys might be up to, Martin breathlessly anticipating a glimpse of recollection in Réjean’s face. Martin perspired like he hadn’t since Réjean’s disappearance, unable to say the thing he needed to, letting moment after moment pass until it was too late. And yet, with each day that Réjean’s memory remained truant, Martin’s sense of security within the household solidified.
While she enjoyed the company and the help around the house, Agathe was losing her patience with Réjean’s mind. Her hope for its return faded a little each time he stroked his beard. He didn’t seem to want to remember. They performed the outward rituals of married people, without the private advantages that set them apart from any other two humans who shared meals and a home. By Réjean’s design, they didn’t touch at all. He had a way of making sure there was something physical separating them at all times; he would make sure that a chair, or Martin, was between them. Being in bed was the toughest part. Pyjama-clad, with nothing in the way, they lay side by side, Réjean squeezing his eyes shut the moment he was under the covers, Agathe waiting for him to turn over and let her know it was okay to go ahead, even if he didn’t remember her. But he just lay there, playing possum. The first few nights, she felt she might explode, being so close to his body, so close to the mouth she couldn’t kiss, struggling with his heat and smell. But after a week had passed, she found she was again able to sleep through the night. She never stopped hoping to feel the pressure of his hand on her body, but as they lay there, she found it increasingly easy to just shrug it off and turn over.
As she pulled into the drive for another Friday night with her new family, she saw the brown envelope from Sondage on the front step. Holding the envelope fondly, she glanced up to see Martin and Réjean looking down at their cards in their usual spots at the kitchen table and pursed her lips.
They ate a chicken fricot in silence, and Agathe checked the clock periodically, trying to imagine what Debbie might be doing, where, and with whom. Suddenly, she said, “Voulez-vous faire quelque chose de fun asoir?”
After dinner, the three of them climbed into the Silverado and headed for the Convenience Place liquor store.
Back at home, Agathe twisted off the top of a beer, working on the beginnings of a callus like the one Debbie had between her thumb and forefinger. Martin poured himself a rum, offered one to Réjean, and tried to hide his disappointment when Réjean declined, dreamily opening a bottle of Bordeaux. Friday nights, at Colonel Weed’s, JC would make a roast and they would drink gallons of wine as the Colonel and his men shared work stories. Réjean never tired of those stories and wondered if maybe, at that moment, they might be telling stories about him.
They sat awkwardly for a minute before Martin lifted his rum. Agathe and Réjean followed, Réjean said, “Beunh,” and they drank.
Booze made cards more fun. It also made it possible, after Agathe had laid down her fifth gin rummy, for Réjean to be able to carelessly reach out and smack her on the arm. They drank and played, and the house filled with smoke and noise. The looser they got, the more Agathe started to recognize in Réjean the man she once knew and the more urgently she wanted to get him to the bedroom. Before long, Martin collapsed sitting up in his chair, his head flopped forward. Agathe reached out and grabbed the front of Réjean’s shirt, pushed him all the way down the hall, and opened the door with his back. When she had directed him to the bed, she threw him down and climbed on top of him, undoing his top shirt button with glee. Réjean, unprepared, only recognized what was happening once he was on the bed and felt the same horrified arousal he had at Stereoblast. His defences kicked in and, without thinking, he flung her off him, into the air, where she seemed to float for a moment before landing on the floor with a muffled thud.
He held his breath, frozen.
The throbbing mass inside her was now working its way to her extremities. This feeling was new, different from the propulsion of sadness or longing, of irritation, boredom, or love. This one made the tips of her fingers and toes burn. She clamped her mouth shut as an unexpected catalogue of words queued up for escape. She knew that, for all the anguish he caused her, he wasn’t really to blame. He simply didn’t know what they’d lost.
But the force would not be contained for long. She flipped over, found her feet, and dusted herself off before retreating briskly to the kitchen. She strained with every muscle to hold in the storm, but when she saw Martin at the kitchen table, still passed out, she broke for just a second to lift his hat and ruffle the soft, flattened hair underneath. He moaned and, without opening his eyes, said, “I was there. With him.”
She stopped, her hand dangling over his head.
“I was there. Wi’ Réjean. Wen he disappeard,” he mused into his lap. “He din’ disappear…he was hit. B’ truck. Took him away. I was there. Withim. I mento tell you, I men to tell…you. He was gon. But now he’s here, eh. Amazing…I ate sanwich…”
The words threaded through her ears like a marquee ribbon. All this time, he had known. He had known. All this time. She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until his head snapped back. His eyes flashed with lucidity and he heard the echo of the words that had just left his mouth.
“You knew?” she said, trembling.
“Oh God,” he said.
Agathe stood a moment longer, trying to take in the man she had fed and nursed like a baby bird. And when she looked at him, and thought of a baby bird, she thought of tiny bones and eggs, and she imagined how a knuckle might shatter an eye socket, the crackling sound it might make, like breaking a little blue shell.
She pushed Martin back, then jerked her hands away from him, and grabbed her coat. As she thrust her arm into the second sleeve, she turned back to him slowly, darkness filling her mind.
“You…ate…his…lunch…” She hissed, as Martin gazed back in terror.
“Oh,” he said. “God.”
She had never felt the urge to hurt something so badly, nor felt so certain she could. As she backed away from Martin, Réjean appeared out of the da
rkness of the hallway, wearing his coat.
“Agathe,” he said softly.
His voice was so intimate that she suddenly turned with every expectation of Réjean, the real one, standing there. But it was only that bearded stranger. She glared back at him, daring him to speak, but he cast his gaze downward and uttered the only thing he could find the voice to express. “Beunh…”
Agathe tore her keys from the wall, pulling the nail free, and Réjean and Martin winced as it tinkled onto the floor.
Inside the Silverado, she revved the engine, idling in front of the kitchen window long enough to watch Martin throw his sobbing face down on his arms and Réjean place a reassuring palm on his shoulder—a gesture of compassion she seethed to think he would never have offered her.
Flooring the accelerator, her gaze fixed on a pinpoint of road, she pitched through the night. Thoughts of Martin and Réjean, the past, the future, Stereoblast, bombarded her from all sides. As each one threatened to touch down, she sped up, fending them off with unharnessed momentum. Ardently, fixedly, she drove.
As her thoughts intensified their attack, she crouched down so that her chin was nearly touching the wheel and concentrated on the clear path ahead until the space between her eyebrows throbbed. She became vaguely aware of a coldness in her eyes from not blinking.
Trooper asked her why, if she didn’t like what she saw, she didn’t change it.
As her focus narrowed, her thoughts were forced outward and began spinning in a sort of centrifuge in her mind, pulling gravitationally to the edges of her consciousness. With one ear cocked for sirens, she glanced into the eternity of woodland whipping past. The wildness would be thrashing uncontrolled in there right now, braying and roaring—the very lawlessness taking her over—and she wanted to get closer, to plunge into its depths. She took the first turn off the main road and peeled down a snow-covered gravel lane, rolling to a stop at the verge of a frozen lake.
Before her spread a clean, white spill of undisturbed snow girded by a belt of forest. As she inhaled deeply in the stillness, her senses newly alert, a thought whiffed down at her from the spinning mass. It was a flash of Réjean, opening his arms to hold her. She sucked in her breath but did not turn away. With all its torment, she looked right at it, letting it pummel her, forcing on her the reality that it would only ever be the past. That new things needed to happen now, because it was urgent. The pain was unlike anything she had ever felt, but she absorbed the shock. Hydraulically.
I Am a Truck Page 12
