Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  He pulls her foot back and begins stroking the arch with his thumb. It tickles, and she laughs. “Where’s Mum and Dad?”

  “Your delightful parents are both out. At the same place. Some Christmas party, for your father’s office. We are all alone.” His tongue slides up her ankle, practised hands at her belt buckle.

  In the doorway, Jo’s mother stands in her camel-hair coat.

  “Tell me what?”

  She sets her handbag down on the chair and begins undoing buttons. Jo is grateful they are alone: Eamon has taken to going out in the evenings lately, saying he’s “making contacts” around job prospects, mostly at the bar. Her father is away again, and Jo wishes he was home, an ally perhaps, she’s not sure, but in any case another full week until he returns seems too long to wait. Still, she can feel her heart speed up, a thudding in her chest. Does she really want to do this now?

  “No, don’t tell me,” her mother says, one hand palm out, face turned away. “I know all about it.”

  For Jo, the air in the room quickens. “You do?”

  Her mother disappears around the corner, and Jo can hear the tinkle of hangers in the closet. She has been holding her breath; she exhales slowly, calming herself, but when her mother returns, arms crossed, Jo looks at her, feels her breath catch again. How could she know?

  Then: “Joan Quentin came into the clinic today.” Jo looks blank. “The registrar.”

  What is her mother talking about? How could the registrar know about her and Eamon?

  “You failed the whole semester, Jo. Not one pass. What on earth have you been doing?”

  In the hallway, the clock ticks in time with the thudding of Jo’s heart, her head; she wonders if it’s a sign of a coming migraine. Everything feels out of whack lately, sick in the mornings, headaches at night.

  “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t say another word.”

  “You wanted to know what I had to say for myself!”

  But Jo says this to her mother’s back. She can hear her in the kitchen, the familiar squeak in the hinge of the cupboard door.

  “Where in God’s name does all the liquor go in this house?”

  Jo has been feeling sick for days, but the next morning is the worst. She gets herself on the bus, thinking she’ll see if she can get an appointment with the dean, arrange some rewrites, try to salvage the semester. Eamon has promised to “help” her, but she doesn’t know what that means. She needs time to think. She needs to get away. Will he come with her?

  “Ah, Jo, girl, It’s not a good time for me, now that I’m just on the verge of a good job.” The Irish lilt is not so sweet, now.

  She’ll try again with her mother. Tonight, after she’s had a chance to talk to the dean. She’ll tell her mother she’s been given a second chance at the college before she breaks the news. Her mother will say, as she often does about matters concerning Jo: “Now, you let me break this to your father when he gets back, and then we’ll talk about it.” She imagines them all sitting down together, Jo and Eamon holding hands on the couch, facing her parents as two people in love, imagines her father’s dismay, her mother’s disappointment, but together they will come to a pragmatic solution, ways to help the two young lovers to get set up in a place of their own…

  The bus lurches, and Jo’s breakfast spills from her stomach onto the floor, vomit running in small rivers down the furrowed slip-resistant mat along the bus’s length. She is off at the next stop and running, boots slipping on the packed snow, back the twelve blocks to her house, her home, her own room where she will pull the covers over her head and pray for oblivion. The cold wind bites at the tears on her cheeks.

  When she opens the door to her room, they are there, her mother and Eamon, an impossible amount of flesh exposed in the flat white winter light.

  Standing at the edge of the Calgary General Hospital parking lot two weeks ago, Jo gazes out at the white light of the day around her, its hard edge of unreality. She is glad she remembered to bring clothes to wear afterwards. She had to fold her now-loose belly into the blue jeans she had bought at the Sally Ann at four months. Her body doesn’t feel like her own: it’s weirdly empty, utterly changed, someone else’s. Everything is brighter than it should be. In the heat, waves rising from the pavement create small mirages around the feet of parking lot pedestrians.

  To anyone passing through the busy parking lot, she is easy to miss; there is a transparent quality to her. Just a young woman in jeans and a t-shirt, straight red hair, a duffel bag at her feet. A person waiting for a ride, maybe, a taxi, or a bus.

  A station wagon pulls over to where Jo is standing and disgorges a family: mother, father, a boy about ten, a teenaged girl a little younger than Jo. The girl, darkhaired, round face, looks at Jo, then looks away as soon as their eyes meet: similar species, different breed. The mother holds a box or chocolates, the kind with soft centres. The father, juggling a potted plant and an armload of magazines and newspapers, drops a Maclean’s magazine at Jo’s feet. Prime Minister Trudeau looks at her from the cover, his chin resting on her sneaker. She makes no move to pick it up.

  “Excuse me,” says the man as he reaches. Reuniting the magazine with the others, he gives her a look, a glance of concern, but his family is already halfway to the hospital’s front doors.

  Jo gathers herself and hoists the duffel bag, crosses the road, and extends her arm, thumb up, against the whoosh of traffic. Her first ride is a chattering young pharmaceutical salesman with thick glasses and bad breath, who seems unperturbed by her monosyllabic replies. “Good luck!” he calls cheerily when he drops her off by a gas station, rolling hills rising to forest and then mountain. In the front seat of the next car that stops, a Volkswagen Beetle, Jo barely has room for her feet amid the flotsam of books and clothes and empty bottles. “Sorry,” says the man with the long hair and sideburns, but he makes no move to clear any of it away. After a while he stops trying to talk to Jo. Her feet wedged into the only spaces she can find, the next two hours pass in silent discomfort before the Beetle pulls over. “Heading up here,” he says, pointing to a dirt road, looking grateful to be relieved of this disturbingly unresponsive passenger. “You’ll probably get another ride soon.” But when she stands at the shoulder in the settling dust, the road stretches empty in both directions.

  She walks for a little over an hour. Dusk begins setting in, making Jo think of a large, dark bird, the settling of wings.

  When the truck slows, she runs to catch up, one hand tender at the base of her belly. Behind her are the long months: first with a high school friend in Lethbridge, sleeping on a couch amid the detritus of the first-time teenage apartment-dweller, the first landing place after flight. Later, the basement apartment she could barely afford on welfare, seeping water, the frequent stab of aloneness despite kind neighbours. Behind her is the roll and sway of new life, the pain of labour, the release of birth, and so many tears she feels scraped raw from the inside out.

  As she jogs a bit to catch up to the truck, her insides feel fragile, loose porcelain rattling in a cardboard box. The driver, waiting, leans across the broad front seat and opens the door. His grin, set in a round face, is friendly.

  “Goin’?” he says.

  She gets in, musters a few words. “The last ride told me there’s a diner up the hill a ways.”

  “Yep. Quite a ways. ’Sclosed, though.” Like some other language. “Goin’?” he asks again.

  “Just drop me off there,” Jo tells him. “I’m meeting somebody.”

  “Hmph,” he grunts, and Jo gets the impression he knows she’s lying.

  “Archie,” he says, looking in his mirrors before pulling back out. He looks at Jo, and she looks ahead, feeling his eyes on her, wondering how long he can keep his eyes from the road without running into the ditch. “Veronica” she says finally, because he said Archie, and it was the first name she can think of.

  There’s a pause, and then
he laughs. “Pretty smart. I’d of pegged you for a Betty, though.”

  Jo, caught, smiles back in spite of herself. She doesn’t offer her real name, and the driver doesn’t ask.

  “Some people don’t like to talk,” he says. “Some like to talk a blue streak. Looks to me like you’re the first kind.”

  “Uh huh,” says Jo.

  They drive in silence for several minutes, Archie transferring the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, Jo looking out at the gathering dark. She feels him appraising her, although he’s looking at the road. She doesn’t care what he thinks. The trees that flank the road appear to be moving closer.

  “Who you meeting at Cass’s diner?”

  “I told you. A friend.”

  “I told you, it’s closed.”

  “My friend will wait for me.”

  “Cass don’t like people hanging around the parking lot.”

  Jo doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t say anything. The cab seems impossibly high up off the pavement moving beneath them. Moths swirl in the headlights. She thinks she can hear the soft thump of small bodies against the front grill over the engine noise, but of course that’s ridiculous.

  “Might be you’re looking for a job?” Archie eyes Jo sideways.

  “Might be.”

  “Got an idea,” Archie says, and starts to reach forward in the general direction of Jo’s knee. Has she misjudged him? She grabs the big chrome door handle, thinking: can’t be going more than thirty on this hill, maybe I can drop and roll; scanning the door pocket for something sharp, something besides B.C. highway maps and magazines. But he reaches for the CB, the receiver lost in his hand like a ball in a catcher’s mitt. She sits, trying to slow her breathing, surprised at the rush of adrenalin.

  “Cass,” he says. “Cass, I got someone here.”

  Great, thinks Jo. There’s two of them.

  “Yep,” he’s saying, “cute little thing.” The truck revs on the downshift and she doesn’t hear what he says. Then the CB’s back in its cradle and he’s grinning at her. “You’ll like Cass,” he says. “She’s a real sweetheart.”

  Jo looks at him then, for the first time, really, and there’s a softness there that makes her want to cry. She looks out the window, determined to keep herself together.

  “You never did tell me where you were goin’, didja?”

  It’s not a question Jo can answer. Since she put out her thumb this morning, where wasn’t something she had considered. She was just going.

  It takes less than ten more minutes to reach the diner at the summit, a little coffee shop with dark windows. Between two Coca-Cola signs, dimly illuminated in the light cast by the lamp standard, a third sign reads: Cass’s Roadside Café. There’s a broad gravel parking lot that could hold several cars, with a long pullout big enough for a couple of trucks. Archie pulls into the middle of the empty lot while Jo sits, one hand on the door handle, unsure of what to do. A light comes on in a trailer she didn’t see before, tucked in the trees behind the diner. The woman who trundles out wears a housecoat and unbuckled Kodiak boots.

  She hauls open the cab door, looks at Jo appraisingly, and clucks at her. “Well, come on, girl, let’s get you settled. I got a bed in the back room; we can make it up in a jiffy. Lord knows I could use a little help around here. Cup of hot chocolate? Sure, you would. I’ve got some instant in the cupboard, pretty sure.”

  That was the first night. Now, Jo returns abruptly to the present—cold coffee in hand, swivel stool beneath her—with the metallic protest of the hinges on the trailer door. Surprise, she thinks; Cass is up. You never can tell. Jo can smell the hot grill, suddenly, and jumps from her perch on the stool. Lost in thought, she has let the grill overheat, with the day’s first customer still nowhere in sight. She’s turning down the gas as she hears Cass’s foot on the back doorstep, winces as she hears Cass’s whisky voice, but there’s humour, there, too.

  “Jesus, girl, you’d think you were trying for Hell’s Kitchen in here.” Cass pauses, head cocked. She’s wearing lipstick the colour of spawning salmon, Jo sees now, even if it’s not quite six-thirty in the morning.

  “Come to think on it,” says Cass, “I do believe I hear the Devil himself this minute coming on down the highway.”

  Jo’s ready to apologize, but Cass is already through the swinging kitchen doors. Turning, Jo can hear the downshift of gears, and at Cass’s Roadside Café, the day begins.

  Cass

  I sure never had any arrangements with Archie to leave runaways and whathaveyou on my doorstep. Archie wasn’t even scheduled for a haul ’til next week, so when the radio in the corner started sputtering that night I jumped right out of my chair where I’d fallen asleep watching late night TV. Archie’s picked up people before he thought shouldn’t be out thumbing rides—too young, or messed up, or whatever—and there’s been more than a couple landed here for a meal. I feed them and they pay what they can or I put them to work, and I don’t pry into their stories. Okay, I pry a little.

  Funny how a little kindness makes you want to cry. I’ve been there myself. So that first night—Archie kept going, said he’d see me on the flip, had a deadline—I give the girl some hot chocolate from the mix in the cupboard, even make it with milk thinking she could use a little something healthy, and when I hand it to her I can see her bottom lip shake a little like it does before you cry, so I turn around and start banging dishes around. Like I said, I’ve been there. I hate crying, and I hate it when people cry. Crying is not something you should have to do in public.

  So when I think she’s had time to pull it back together I turn around and tell her she can have the back room in the trailer, the one that’s usually the dumping ground for stuff I don’t know what to do with, where I keep a single bed against surprise guests. Hand her an armful of bedding and a pillow like I’m saying this ain’t no hotel and you ain’t no charity case, just so she doesn’t feel like one.

  Well, that girl’s got a story, no doubt about it. You can see it, just about eating her up. Been there myself, you get stuck inside whatever it is that’s eating you, and you can’t see past about two inches in front of your nose because of all the stuff whirling around inside like a pack of dogs in a cage. When that happens there’s no getting out of it but by your own choosing.

  But then, everyone who comes through this place has a story. Everyone’s going somewhere. Everyone’s coming from somewhere. Cass’s Roadside Café is a stop on the way, that’s all. Sometimes, sometimes I get a repeat customer, someone who remembers the slice of pie on the way through, decides another on the return trip is a good idea. And I do get some regulars, Bob, mostly, on duty or off. And Archie, but Archie doesn’t come for the pie, although if you asked him, he’d say he comes for the sweet stuff and wink at you. It’s a good arrangement, works for both of us. Sometimes I think that’s all life is, a series of arrangements. That, and whatever drives into the parking lot. I like the chance of that. The luck of the draw. Toss of the dice.

  People who come through here all come from somewhere. One day they get up and think to themselves: I’ve had enough of this, or: I can’t wait to get to that. They turn to their wife or husband or whatever and say: I’m leaving, or they call their lover and say: I’m on my way. Or they just say to whoever is closest: let’s go.

  And some people just like the road.

  Bottom line is, though, I can use some help around here. For one thing, I hate getting up early mornings. I could use an early riser, someone to open up. But next morning there she is in a nest of blankets and sheets, all the stuff that had been piled on the cot shoved onto the floor. I wake her up and tell her where she can find a towel and some soap and shampoo, and to come to the diner when she’s done. Takes her an hour before she finally makes her way across the parking lot and then I take one look at her and say: work starts tomorrow. She might be cleaner than she was, but you can tell she’s bone weary. Send her back to bed with a cinnamon bun fresh from the oven and on
e of those newspapers somebody left behind with a front-page story about aliens, and tell her to take all the time she needs. And she needs it, you can tell.

  There’s this moment when I think she’s going to cry again. Just a moment, her standing there wearing the same clothes as before but a little colour in her face, those pale eyes looking at me. She has the newspaper pressed to her chest with one hand and the bun on the plate I’ve just given her, the sun was slanting through the window and lighting up her hair still wet from the shower. You can see she’s a pretty girl, and no dummy, either, and I don’t know, I feel like—like she’s my kid, for a minute, however weird that sounds since I don’t have a kid and I didn’t ever want one, at least, not one of my own. There was Donnie, but that’s another thing. Happier on my own: grew up with a whack of sisters in a house that was never quiet, never one damn thing that was just mine. I never wanted a kid or a dog or a cat or a husband. In any order.

  “—Go!” I tell her, waving my hand, looking away. “Get lost and let me get to work. And fix up that room of yours, make yourself a little space. Go on.”

  But I say the last bit to the back of her, because she’s out the door and striding across the parking lot on the longest, skinniest legs I think I’ve seen, red hair flapping behind her and her mouth around that cinnamon bun like there’s no tomorrow.

  Jo

  I put away the cinnamon bun, which is delicious, and then, like it’s obviously the next thing to do, I put away my clothes. What there is of them. Plaid flannel shirt, green. It always makes me feel warm, and happy, though I can’t say why, exactly. I’m wearing my jeans, but there’s a pair of cords I brought, a couple of t-shirts, sweaters. Mum always said I dressed like a lumberjack. Man, if she could see me now, in the back of this trailer in the middle of nowhere. Lumberjack Central, that’s what this is.