Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  Lizzie scratches under the cat’s chin. He purrs and begins kneading her shoulder and arm. She winces, then draws him around her face like a muffler.

  “What’s up, Lezzie?”

  She examines my doughy face. “You’re so fucking high, Mars,” she says, shaking her head.

  I pull out a can of Pringles from my pack and we sit in the dark, crunching for a long time.

  “Wanna blaze?” I ask after a while, and show her my baggie full of primo weed.

  Lizzie shakes her head.

  “Come on,” I say, lightly poking her ribs. “Unwind.”

  When Lizzie flinches, pulls away hugging the couch pillow tighter, I feel the familiar bile backing up my throat.

  The cat stretches out, yawns, and drops to the floor.

  We poke around the past, laughing at how many times we sat on this very couch together, trading punches and kicks over who got to choose the Saturday cartoons.

  “Remember when Dad built us that fort up the Garry oak?” she says.

  “Plywood and tin from the dump.” I nod.

  “Mom in her paisley pants, making curtains for the cut-outs,” Lizzie says, but her words begin to drift.

  “Then you kicked me out for farting.”

  Lizzie closes her eyes.

  I sit up tall. “And that road trip to the Grand Canyon. We went camping and you brought along your best friend, Heather.”

  It was astonishing. We drove to where the earth was punched out, and the river running along the bottom was like some kind of ancient bloodline. South Rim running. My father made sure we were equipped for the trails, and we made it all the way to the bottom.

  “The way Heather’s curly hair bounced on that walk. My first big crush,” I say.

  “Making excuses to get into our tent. Bonehead move, Mars.”

  “My bone was moving,” I say and finish it off with a wild whistle.

  “Stoner.”

  “Ass-kisser.”

  “Masturbator.”

  “Chicks do it, too. I saw those hairy-chested freaks in the old posters from your locker.”

  For a while, we both sit back in our awkward sibling slump. It’s like an energy transformation, the fields scattering between us. My brain is a live-wire act and I’m the drunken tightrope walker. Maybe if I watch Lizzie long enough, maybe if I can catch my mother on the edge one of her moods, maybe if I flick the knife edge just right, I can make room enough to set us all free. I’m so fucking high right now, my face feels like thumbed putty.

  Lizzie looks up at me, droopy-eyed. I nudge her over so she tips her head onto the couch armrest.

  All we need is a route, I think. On the road with my father and Lizzie, the mountain passes we’ll climb, tunnels and bridge crossings all the way to the 101, and then up the coast to hear the sea lions bark in Monterey Bay. Three abreast in the front cab, we’ll mock the monster RVs slowing traffic in that sticky southern heat.

  “Be right back,” I say, leaving her curled up on her side. The cat hops up into my space to keep her warm.

  A few minutes later, I’m back with her suitcase. I drop it on the floor and zip it open in front of her. Inside I’ve gathered some of her sweaters. Her favourite novels. The heavy black lacquered box she protects with a puny padlock, as if I’ve never learned how to slip a lock with a paper clip.

  She screws up her face. “You touched my stuff.”

  My mother’s credit card is tucked inside my front pocket. I smile, show her the wad of cash I’ve put away from my weekend job, mostly selling pot for Shiner.

  “Been saving,” I say. “Dad’s not far. Just across the US border. You always wanted to see Montana.”

  Lizzie shakes her head. “I’m almost eighteen, Mars,” she replies, depositing the restless cat to the floor. “Full scholarship. Then I’m gone.”

  I pick at invisible curled leaves clinging to the elastic band of my socks. My mouth tastes ragged and sour, like some pissed-on paper bag.

  Lizzie sits up again, so I unzip and set out my full stash of food. Doughnuts and pickles and cheddar wedges emerge like a magic show. Voila! A couch picnic. Like when we were kids and Mom would come home from work Friday nights to make our favourite bacon-wrapped wieners, then bake all weekend. Starting Saturday, me, Lizzie, and Mom would all be lying on two couches, devouring a slab of marble fudge right from the pan, no forks, waiting for the next batch to come out of the oven.

  While I unwrap more carrots, Lizzie takes small, sour bites from a dill pickle. Tucked into a plastic container are two whipped-chocolate cupcakes. Lizzie picks one up, lifts the left corner of her lip, then drops the cupcake back into the plastic tray.

  “She chose me,” she says quietly.

  Her whole body begins to quake. A whiff of rotting bog churns in the air between us. All I want to fucking do is pound my own throat.

  “Come with me. Tonight.” I tell her and slap the tent her blanket has made across her body.

  She pulls at the frayed edges of the blanket and shakes her head. “We’re all going to leave her, Mars.”

  The cat trots over to his food bowl and begins licking the tops of the dried food out of his green dish. I break up bits of cheese and drop them inside.

  When we’ve finished off most of my stash, I pack up the leftovers. “You want anything else?” I ask Lizzie. “A chest like Heidi Klum?”

  Lizzie tosses me the end of her stubby carrot. “Here’s your butt plug, Mars. Found it in the cushions.”

  We laugh-snort. Lizzie removes one of her dirty socks and launches it in my face. I ball the sock up and toss it behind the furnace, next to our father’s boxes marked “Goodwill” and “Dump.”

  When she waves her hand in front of my face, I notice the pads of her fingers are red and glossy. The flesh of her middle finger is peeling back, so the new skin underneath is shiny, almost liquid. She pulls her hand away and hides it under the blanket.

  We watch in silence as the cat unwinds from his shrimp-in-a-plum-sauce pose. When he stretches and hops back on the couch between us, I hear thumping upstairs.

  Lizzie draws the blanket up around her ears. She kicks me so I jump up to take a look.

  At the top of the stairs, I slip down the hall, peek inside my mother’s room, and notice her binders have dropped to the floor. She’s snoring heavily. I slip back down again and shake my head.

  “Nothing. Just your unibrow clippers recharging.”

  Lizzie starts to laugh. It’s a thin one that catches the end of a sob, and she draws in a sharp breath. I grab her suitcase and agree to deposit it back in her room, will shove it into a dark corner, packed and ready for later.

  The food remnants I bundle into my backpack. She lies back, slurs out a few aimless words about making her a promise to stay put. I tell her Shiner is picking me up in an hour so we can meet some fine ladies from the padded leather lounge that always let us in without ID. Tell her I’ll be back before our mother makes her first coffee. Whisper, “I’ll always be back.”

  I leave Lizzie tucked in beside the cat, which is kneading her belly.

  Midnight is a flame tip in my skunky mouth, loitering near the Albert Street underpass, watching cars spit out of this shadow hole. Headlights glow bright then fade away behind me. Half-frozen in the drizzling rain, I imagine how long each driver has been travelling, what loads they’re carrying, who will meet them at the end of the line.

  The end of the line for me will be a ten-hour straight shot across the border, following my father’s favourite route into the upper plains of Montana, easy as pie crossing from Alberta at Coutts-Sweetgrass. I’ll track down the US trucking company from my father’s last email. Call that dick dispatcher my father described. The phony bastard with the Texas drawl and sweaty JC Penny T-shirts, who started him on the worst routes, tearing down interstates with loads of diapers, telling him to suck back on more energy drinks and screw the logbook. Two years riding as an independent, trained for dangerous goods, yet he’s still hounded by bottom-rung
bastards. Or maybe now he’s keeping the wheels turning for one of the bigger outfits. I’ll stop in at one of those shiny truck stops with showers and 24/7 laundry. How hard will it be to find a Canadian trucker named Getsky with a son named Mars? Like the famous hockey player? they’ll ask. Like the planet, I’ll answer.

  I yank my zipper up to my chin, pull on my blunt, until my head is so loose it’s directing traffic. Back on the road, I hold my thumb out to hitch a ride. Save my stash to catch a paid lift across the border.

  Just watch. My father and I will hit the road together, hauling cases of freeze-dried noodles, whole pallets of sealed Xboxes. On twelve-hour stretches through the Dakotas and down, I’ll catch my father up on Mussolini. How Il Duce cozied up to Hitler and his Nazi pals at Munich, screwing over Chamberlain. The old Brit thought he’d negotiated peace with honour but ended up being frog-marched right into World War II. Concessions, appeasement; Christ, look what happens when you give in to a hard-liner? You’re hopeless. Steer your own path, that’s what my father followed. The old man could change his own oil when he was ten.

  The rain is rattling hard against my backpack. Noxious fuel combusts in my lungs as I walk along the roadside, thumb out toward the trickle of cars motoring through the underpass. Mostly, I’m invisible, and the drivers keep their eyes steady on the road ahead. Then for a while, it’s nothing but SUVs plus the odd out-of-towner looking lost on the road from the airport. They think we’re all golden wheat fields and peeling grain elevators, not football-obsessed face painters with a fucked-up taste for pouring beer over Clamato juice.

  The shaking starts in my shins. A tremor sent from the highway up my chest before I see it. A big rig, the size of Texas, roaring down Albert Street. I sprint further down the road so the trucker has enough time to see me under the street lamp. I try to look harmless, or at least not so stoned, even manage to smile. My thumb shoots out. The crystal-and-chrome headlamps flash at me. I can’t believe it when the truck slows down and pulls up ahead onto the shoulder.

  The massive engine idles, and I can make out a large man leaning over to open the passenger door as I run up to the rig. Climbing up the aluminum steps, I smile as he powers the window down.

  “Where to?” he says. He’s got a Midwestern accent, telling me he’s going to drop two loads along the ring road off Highway 1, then head straight down Highway 39.

  “Montana,” I say, diesel fumes plugging my throat on the running board. I explain that my father is also a long-hauler, en route from Montana, and we’re supposed to meet up just over the border.

  The old guy looks me over and squints as the word long-hauler drops and swishes around in my skull. My tongue feels slack, weirdly thin. I keep smiling.

  Finally, he says he can get me within spitting distance of Coutts-Sweetgrass and waves me inside.

  Doors shut, we pull out. I thank him, then tip my head against the foggy passenger window, using my knapsack as a pillow for a while.

  But the trucker’s craving company, because as we drive on he curses the price of diesel, laughs about the polite Canadian prairie folk with their wide-open vowels.

  When I point out that he’s just missed the ring road turn-off, he leans over, promises to take me as far as I am willing to go, and strokes my wrist.

  I pull my arm back, slowly, trying to keep things cool. He’s just friendly, I think. Midwesterners are like that, my father said. Sunny, breadbasket folks, main street people, loaded up on so many carbs they’ve gone comatose. He reaches out toward me again. This time he grabs my knee and squeezes.

  All right, I think, and pull the backpack from the window down to my lap. I fish inside. The penknife? Gone. All I’ve got is some boxers and a frosted cupcake.

  Trucker shoots me an eager look. Door locks. Automatic. Can’t even roll my own window down. He’s got an antsy look, while I go through my knapsack mumbling about cookies. He releases one of his hands from the wheel and lets it crawl over his own lap.

  So I tell him how Mussolini had a pet lion cub named Ras that he took everywhere. Mussolini’s driver, a Hitler look-alike, would chauffer the dictator around town, his gloved hands tight on the wheel, glancing over in fear every once in a while at the front-seat passenger, because Il Duce always kept that restless lion on his lap.

  “Il Duce loved to cradle that cub on long drives,” I say, grinning, and then begin to pet the backpack on my own lap, wild-eyed and paranoid, an exaggerated stroke, my eyes popping.

  “Oh yeah?” trucker says, his voice getting ragged and low. From the corner of my eye, I see him fishing under his shirt flap at the fly of his own jeans.

  “Cub was a gift from the Minister of the Interior,” I inform him, and my mouth is a desert, my whole body seizing, trying to keep things steady. “Il Duce rode up front in his bowler hat, flashing his bulging eyes at the cub, who had his one paw draped over his arm and the other around the man’s neck, like some kind of house cat.”

  Jesus Fuck. Trucker looks like he’s trying to one-hand juggle his own nuts.

  He leans my way and reaches over with his right hand as if he’s pointing to something out my window. He lets his arm drop between my belly and the backpack. I squirm in my seat. He’s trying to grab hold of my cock. The trucker keeps smiling at the windshield.

  “Crazy how fast that cub struck!” I shout.

  The trucker howls, the rig pulls a hard right. “It was a fucking bloodbath,” I say, and launch another fist at his throat.

  He takes his foot off the gas, tries to cover his face, and we slow-crawl toward the red light. I unlock and kick open my door, the rain staining his custom butter-yellow leather seats.

  Before he can grab a piece of my shirt, I jump out.

  The rig stops. I notice all the placards in their metal frames on the side of the rig, the orange diamond with the flaming head that says “Dangerous Goods.” Trucker is about to blast from his cab, come after me, but the light changes and a half-ton rolls up on his back end, honking. The old man curses at me out the window, holding his pulpy face as he rolls out.

  I wave him off with a middle finger.

  My knees give out. My mouth is a howl as I sink on the field and begin to bawl. And I can’t stop. Snot. Shoulders heaving. Chest caving in. Like some whining coward.

  It’s so cold out. Trying to bust up this night in my brain, I light up. My fingers keep jumping when I set my blunt tip aflame.

  I’m not in the middle of nowhere, but close. Drained of light, this far from the city core, it’s like someone has dragged the constellations up to the end of my nose. The stars are so bright, hovering in this reckless void, I can almost smell hydrogen, like rotting eggs filling up my lungs. The stars will still be up there come daylight, but invisible, hidden by sunlight scattering across the atmosphere. Block out the sun, darken things up, and the whole damn sky would still be filled with stars. Like my father and me setting out on the road, looking out behind that curved windshield, breathing life into the eternal, starlit sky, nowhere to go but on.

  In a week, I’ll meet up with him on the road, and we’ll be cruising together through Montana’s pine-covered mountains on Route 93. My father in the upper bunk; me spread-eagled on the floor next to our growing laundry pile. We’ll joke about traffic cops, Saskatchewan winters, and those damn trailer-swayers. One day I’ll even tell him the one about the dumb-ass trucker and the killer cub.

  If I hoof it over the railway tracks and across town, I can make it to the bus station before dawn. I’ll join the mobs of students and drifters on the early bus heading out of town. All the way to the US border, my Greyhound seat will smell like flat Coke and old farts. Will cost me half of what I’ve got. The border guys will make a fuss, but I’ll give them the signed consent letter that says I’m meeting my father at the other end. It will be a slow-grinding, six-miles-per-gallon crawl to the US crossing, and the fifty-five-seater coach isn’t going to catch up to my father’s big rig any time soon. But my trip is ten hours from empty prairie, and my dr
eams only travel one way.

  Battle of the Bow

  Two years after Marcus died, a man arrived in a blue sedan.

  It was the Flood in reverse, Noah spilling out from his ark with his supporters, extending his peachy-pink flesh to the prairie faithful assembled on the church steps. They came in a blizzard. Five soft-jowled men in city suits stepped into the November chill. As snow gusted across banks three feet high, the reverend leaned into the wind, blinking frost from his lashes. The church committee encircled the men; their white fingers gripped around cups of powdery hot chocolate.

  The idea had come to old pastor Sherman in a vision. Needing to bring his lagging congregation back to life, barely a trickle above twelve on a snowy Sunday, the pastor had sent his prayers south from Vermouth County along the latitude of the Lord.

  On a stream of perdition and penance came the answer: the Reverend Evan Nack.

  “Welcome to Vermouth,” I hear Pastor Sherman say, holding out his hand, slipping his pocked skin into the young reverend’s firm grip, then leading the men to the church basement.

  Their buffed oxfords clack, clack along the polished floor I mop after Thursday bingo. The reverend can’t be more than thirty-five, his tawny skin bright as a new penny.

  I see the pastor’s face pinched tight. Beneath the reverend’s tan overcoat is a cotton shirt buttoned low, revealing an unwelcome wilderness. The old man averts his eyes, invites the city folk over to a folding table for tea and refreshments.

  They say Pastor Sherman arrived in 1914 with a group of believers who came west along Alberta’s Bible Belt, a straight shot from Highway 21 to heaven. They set up on the south bank of the Bow, where they built the church Gothic style, with a front-gabled roof, heaven-lit by one circular stained-glass window. When the droughts hit Vermouth soon after, few locals were interested in bearing witness. Then a later spiritual resurgence awakened weary hearts, and word spread like wildfire from Alberta to Saskatchewan of the coming glory days for lush fields and well-fatted cattle. By the time we arrived in 1962, the fierce summers had once again ravaged farms, leaving behind dry creeks, grasshopper infestations, and faith grown as parched as these prairie fields.