by Anne Degrace
“Remarkable,” says Bob.
“Uh huh.”
“Like my head is full of something…woolly.”
Pink grins and looks at him sideways. “Got any food?” he asks.
Bob does. He has one of Cass’s cinnamon buns. It might be a little stale: he’s been carrying it in the car since yesterday. Jo had chosen the biggest one to wrap in wax paper, so large she couldn’t fit it in the brown paper bag. In the end, she’d just given it to him. “Too big for the bag,” she said.
“A happy problem.”
“Yeah. I guess it is.” She’d given him a half-smile, then, and he’d felt the room light up the way it does when someone who doesn’t smile often decides to. He was happier about that smile than the size of the cinnamon bun, but now, as he gets up to get it, he finds he’s pretty happy about that, too.
There is an issue with depth perception as Bob makes his way to the car. Pink watches, knowing that, for Bob, his boots on the path are at that moment sharper, closer, and the mechanism of brain to motor function quite astonishing as a process, knows that Bob will be amazed he has never considered this before, and that as he does, he will start smiling. As the Mountie turns, grinning, Pink knows he’s right.
Half the lukewarm coffee goes into Pink’s blue tin camp cup. They sit in the doorway on the step, each leaning against one side of the doorframe. To Pink, the coffee tastes great, even if it’s cold. To Bob, it’s a whole different drink. But it’s the cinnamon bun that really surprises him, and Pink laughs at the look on his face.
“It’s a trip, eh, man?”
“Yeah,” says Bob.
The sun, higher in the sky now, warms the clearing.
“It’s like the road,” Pink continues. “After a while it’s not about getting there. It’s about going there. Know what I mean?”
“No,” says Bob. “Yes.”
Bob starts laughing, and Pink, stoned, laughs too. It’s a while before either of them can speak.
“Want another toke?”
“Yeah,” says Bob.
They smoke in silence, and when the roach is finished they both lean back and look up at the tree canopy. There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say, so neither of them speaks. The woods around them settle into midday. Pink lies back, thinking about Stan and Nora. What they might be thinking, wondering where he is. If he wrote them, what would he say? I’m hitchhiking with the wind?
“Where did you come from?” Bob asks, and Pink wonders if he was thinking out loud.
“Been here all the time.”
“No, really. Before here.”
He could lie, but he doesn’t. “Washington State. It’s a long story.” There is a moment when Pink thinks about being in Canada, no papers, nothing. But then he thinks: I’ve just smoked a reefer with a cop. What have I got to worry about?
Bob plucks a piece of grass from beside the step and inserts it between his teeth. It was time to leave a long time ago. “That’s the problem with this marijuana, obviously,” he says aloud. “It makes you feel like not doing anything.”
“Yep.”
“You have parents?” Bob asks.
“Yeah. I’m adopted, actually, when I was six or so, by my aunt and uncle.”
“And your parents?”
“Accident.”
“So they took you in. What do they think of you being up here?”
“They don’t know. I haven’t been in touch.”
The image of Nora, smoothing his shirt, adjusting his collar before he stepped on the bus in Pullman, so proud of his college scholarship. When he was in high school, Nora had sat with him evenings at the kitchen table, working through grade ten math problems right alongside him. “And Nora, with only grade nine herself,” he once heard Kevin’s mother say to a neighbour as he let himself in the back door to slip up to Kevin’s room.
“I…dropped out of college. Nothing made any sense. I couldn’t see why any of it mattered.”
“Hmmmm.”
“There was this girl I tripped with. Gorgeous eyes. Beautiful. In the morning she was packing up to hit the road, heading for Canada. I just…followed her. We got across the border on a Greyhound bus that took almost all of my money. When I woke up that first morning in the hostel in Vancouver, she’d taken the rest of it. I ended up working at the hostel, which is where I met Simon, who, I guess, started it all.”
Bob leans back against the cabin doorframe. The sun makes him want to close his eyes, so he closes them, while Pink speaks; his words wrapped in something like cottonwood fluff. As Pink begins, Bob remembers, as a child, wanting to walk into the pages of the fairy-tale book, ride beside the prince on his horse. Listening to Pink’s story, he feels as if that leap has occurred, the difference between listener and storyteller indecipherable. He is magically, wonderfully, in the moment.
Pink meets Limey Simon at the Vancouver commune he finds after spending a couple of chilly nights in Stanley Park, shortly after arriving in Canada. The Englishman is serving up a communal dinner at a table made from a door set on sawhorses. Nobody really knows where Simon came from, but one day after he and Pink smoke a few joints, Simon tells him. They’re in an upstairs room in the big house on Venables, mattresses pushed up against the wall. The attic window is open, the evening breeze warm.
“It happened in Cheltenham, during my clergical training a few years ago.”
“Clergical training?”
“Reverend Simon to you, mate.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Far out,” says Pink, settling back against the pillows.
“I was just finishing up my year and heading to the pub for a celebratory pint with my mates. I was driving an ancient old beast, then. You didn’t really see hitchhikers out on those narrow lanes, but here was a black fellow waving me down. I fancied myself a progressive and so made a point of stopping, when some of my mates wouldn’t have. Helping your fellow man is, after all, the point, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. ’Course.”
“So, right. I pick up this chap and he climbs in and I swear I could hear his stomach growling as soon as he’s got himself tucked in. ‘I have some apples in the boot,’ I told him, but then I remembered I had taken them out. If this fellow was disappointed he hid it well, just smiled and told me he was going to meet his girl in London. ‘I’m only going to Gloucester, to the pub,’ I told him. That was okay with him. I apologized for the car—it was a horrible old thing that belched blue smoke and rattled like a tin can, more rust than metal, held together with holes, you could say—but he said he was just grateful for the ride, and if it came to needing a push, at least I’d have an extra set of muscles. Well, that made us pals if we weren’t before, I’ll tell you.
“Then he started telling me his story, just like I’m telling you this story, just like you’ll tell your story to somebody else—” Pink, inhaling, holding, entertains the notion of stories within stories, like the disappearing picture on the tin can of hard candies: on the can a picture of another can, and on that can a picture of another can…
“—and by the time he was finished I wanted to take him all the way to Oxford. Getting robbed like that, by people who picked him up and whom he’d trusted, even taking the ring he was bringing to ask his girl to marry him. Leaving him sitting on the side of the road, half his stuff still in the boot of their car as they beetled off.”
“You believed him?” even to Pink in the haze of the moment it sounds like bullshit, a story calculated to elicit sympathy.
“Well, I reasoned he was either as desperate as he said he was because he was robbed, or desperate enough to lie, and either way I was sympathetic. Compassion is what I’d been taught, after all.”
“You didn’t care about looking like an idiot?”
“It all gets sorted out in Heaven, mate,” says Simon. “Anyhow, we’re coming up to the pub and my mates are waiting outside the door, all of them messengers of the Lord but not a teetotaller among them. We�
�d raise our glasses in a toast: Let the Spirits be With You, we’d say. I looked at my passenger, feeling sorry for the long trip ahead of him. ‘I’d like to take you all the way, mate,’ I told him, but he said this was fine, he was sure to get a ride soon, happy in the anticipation of seeing his girl, however long it took. But I was thinking about him, stomach growling, arriving with nothing in his pockets and no ring to give her, and I pulled over across the street from the Queen’s Head, my mates no doubt wondering all the while who the Wog was— that’s what we called the blacks, we didn’t even think about it—I had in the car. I had received a hundred pounds as a graduation present from my aunt. I had been off to buy a round and then a good suit and shoes to set me on my way. I gave it to him.
‘“I can’t take this,’ he told me. ‘Then consider it a loan,’ I said. ‘We’ll meet in one year right here, at this pub.’ I looked at my watch, ‘Five-thirty.’”
“And did you?”
“Well, that’s the story. A whole lot happened in that year. I wanted to come to Canada then, actually, but one thing after another seemed to get in the way. One of my mates got sick and I ended up taking over his parish for a while, a little rural village full of old ladies who thought I was far too young to know anything. It was a bloody awful year during which I made enough gaffes from the pulpit that the church had reprimanded me about as much as they were going to.
“Things going as they were, I started to think about the fellow in my car, and wondered how he fared. By then I was facing a sort of mutiny at the hands of the parish ladies, and so I wrote my superior and suggested a replacement for me might be in order, perhaps someone older, thereby saving him the trouble. And with not much money and no longer any vehicle, I found my way to the Gloucester pub on the appointed day, at the appointed time. I wasn’t so much interested in the money, you understand. But I wanted to know if he was really the chap I thought he was; if I’d read him right.”
“And?”
“He was standing outside, waiting for me. I was delighted to see him. ‘Can I stand you a pint?’ I offered. But no, he said, his wife and new baby were waiting for him. ‘Where’s your car?’ he asked me, and I told him it had long given up the ghost.
“‘That’s good,’ he said, and I wondered why, but he went on. ‘We got out of London,’ he began. ‘Good!’ I said, and he nodded, continuing. ‘No place for a wee one. I got a job at a tire shop, and then moved on to fixing autos up, selling them.’ ‘You’ve done well, then,’ I said. ‘Very well. I’ve brought your hundred pounds.’ I was more than delighted, and pleased with myself for trusting my fellow man. Then he pointed to a pretty blue Mini across the street. ‘It’s in the glovebox.’
“‘Have I got to go take it out?’ I asked, thinking he’d left my money in there. I was confused, because by now he was grinning from ear to ear. ‘You can take it out now, or you can drive somewhere else and take it out, doesn’t matter to me, mate.’ And then I see he’s holding out the keys. ‘A good turn deserves a good turn,’ he says.
“He had to leave. We said goodbye, and I realized after he’d sped off that I didn’t get his name, but then I thought: as far as he’s concerned, the book’s closed, isn’t it? But it never really is. It just goes on. Stories. Good turns. Perfect, really.”
“Hey, what happened to the minister thing? Aren’t you supposed to be in a church?”
“This IS my church. Well, the world is, I guess. I let the wind take me where I’m needed, and it took me here.”
“The wind, huh?”
When Pink decides to hit the road a few days later, “Go with the wind, mate,” says Simon over one last reefer, and they both laugh about it a little too long.
When he heads out to the highway, there’s only one way to go: east. It’s also the direction of the wind. Pink remembers the wind, the night of the fire, the pull of it. He begins walking in the direction of its gentle persuasion. It’s all the plan he has.
They sit for a while, and Bob can feel himself coming down. This has probably been foolish. Definitely. This has definitely been foolish. What was he thinking?
“How do you decide when to stop?” he asks Pink.
“Stop?”
“Yeah. You going to just hitchhike around for the rest of your life?”
“I figure I’ll know when the journey’s over.”
“How?”
“A sign, man. I’m just waiting for a sign.”
Pink’s cup, tied to his pack, bangs against the boots tied there as they walk up the path. At the cruiser, they pause, Bob’s hand on the door, while Pink looks towards the cars passing on the main road, thinking of missed lifts. Bob drops him up a ways at a truck pullout, a good hitchhiking spot.
“Thanks, man,” Pink says.
Bob nods curtly and pulls out onto the highway. Chances are excellent that Cass has a good soup on, and a BLT sounds just about right.
1:05 p.m.
Toasted BLT
The black and white car that pulls in is covered with leaves as the wind whips up again. To Jo, it looks as if a dust devil has descended to dance right in front of the door. Do they only spin in one direction? Clockwise, or counterclockwise?
Jo met Bob on her first day on the job. He made her laugh, she remembers. Something about a sandwich.
He enters, brushing off the shoulders of his uniform. Jo likes him, and yet, cops can be so inscrutable, she thinks. They give nothing away.
“What’s up, Jo?” he asks as he settles himself at the counter.
“Not much. Vegetable beef today.”
“Okay. And a bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Can you do that?”
Jo shoots him a look that says: Of course I can; what do you think? and heads for the kitchen.
“Coffee? Did I need to say it?”
Jo re-emerges. “Sorry. Forgot.”
As she pours his coffee, Bob feels the urge to talk. Maybe it’s the residual effects of the dope. Maybe it’s living alone, no real conversation today except at the detachment, before he went out to bust non-existent speeders. Maybe it’s having just been at the cabin with Pink that makes him ask: “Cass ever mention Howie?”
“The guy that lived in the cabin? The retarded guy?” Jo has come across the cabin before, out walking one day after closing up, but, unsure if it was occupied, didn’t approach. She’d asked Cass about it later, and Cass had explained that when she inherited the restaurant, she seemed to have inherited Howie, a relative of the former owner. Inheriting Howie meant seeing he had enough to eat, that he had what he needed, a duty picked up by locals between café owners, then happily handed back once Cass turned up.
“Howie—had his own way about him,” Bob allows, now. “I’m going to take that cabin down. So it doesn’t become a party place. Public safety issue. You know.”
“Uh, sure.” Jo pushes back through the swinging doors, pulls the bacon from the cooler, fires five pieces onto the hot grill, filling the air with the pungent, smoky smell.
“She ever tell you about that niece of hers, and Howie, what happened?” Bob calls through the window.
“No,” Jo answers. On the grill, the bacon sizzles and spits. It’s several minutes before she emerges from the kitchen, soup and sandwich in hand.
“You want to hear it?” Bob asks when she sets them down. “Got time?”
Jo looks at the empty restaurant and smiles. “Sure.”
The mayonnaise drips out between the toast pieces, and Bob carefully wipes it from his moustache. “When I asked Donnie about it afterwards—that’s Cass’s niece—she kept talking about Derflops.”
“About what?”
“That’s pretty much what I said. But you know, she wasn’t quite four years old, though she was smart as a whip: could count to twenty, and knew her ABCs. Still, between her and Howie, it was hard to get the whole story, but I managed to piece it together.”
Bob takes another bite of his sandwich.
“It was October. I remember, because hunting season had just opened
. And it must have been a Sunday, because Cass used to close on Sundays. Anyway, Cass told me she’d managed to convince Donnie to take a nap that day, Cass having been up late watching TV and drinking a little rye and ginger the way she liked to, and she was feeling like a nap herself. Donnie was used to amusing herself, but she must have got hungry because she wandered over to the restaurant, got herself a sandwich of some kind from the fridge. When Cass woke up and couldn’t find the girl, she ran around calling at first, worried. Then she noticed that Donnie had taken her rock with her. It was a river rock, heart-shaped, that Donnie had kept on the shelf beside her bed since the day she and her mother—in a rare time of mother-daughter togetherness, far as I can tell—found it by the creek. Then, Cass found the fridge door open, and the drawer where the paper bags were kept, and she put it together. That’s when she called me.
“She figured that Donnie might have wandered off to have a picnic in the woods. Cass told me she’d taught her that song, ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic,’ just that morning. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense, you know? I was about twenty minutes out, nobody closer. It’s a big territory, and there was a domestic dispute that day, some sort of standoff had the detachment pretty busy. I told Cass to stay close to the diner, just keep calling for her. Didn’t think she could get too far on those little legs of hers.”
“Wouldn’t she be worried someone had taken her?”
“Well, it’s the middle of nowhere here, really, and about fifteen years ago. Different times. Bigger danger was that she’d wandered onto the highway. When I finally got there, Cass was running up the road calling and she was checking the ditch. Don’t think I’ll ever forget her face, the look on it.”
“And?” Jo can imagine the panic, the desperate need to find the missing child.
“We started expanding our search. It was easier with two. Problem was, we didn’t know how long she had been gone. We didn’t know she was with Howie. Funny thing, we didn’t even think about Howie, though it seemed obvious after.”
