Back Roads

by Andrée A. Michaud

  “No, not that, not snow,” says Heather quietly, halted by the new scent in the wind, her memory absorbed by a blizzard that whipped her skin till it was red and the roar of the snowmobiles that once chased her. Gun, she thinks, gun, quick, and she struggles back up the slope, catching her breath as she moves level with the carpet of dead leaves, before finally making her way back to the spot where the Buick stopped, its path blocked by the mass of trees.

  Vigilantly looking around, she supports herself on a branch and opens the Buick’s trunk, which squeaks like an old rusty door. Lying on the worn carpet in the back of it gleams the gun she expected to find. Not far away, the blade of the axe she dropped as she made her way out of the car sparkles amid the shards of glass.

  * * *

  I was right. So was Holy Crappy Owl. The little woman isn’t innocent. She came here as a scout, to spy on me and gather information about Heather Thorne, about how I live, about the set-up of the house. She also used the opportunity to note the arrangement of my study, which she could see out of the corner of her glazed eye as she was sitting at the kitchen table.

  As for the son, he’s not the innocent victim of a cunning mother. He, too, is in it up to his neck, pushed into it by the brute of an older brother for whom he feels limitless admiration. I never should have opened up my house to this teenager looking too ordinary to be true, nor to that woman with the too-widely spaced toes, who probably saw the shadow of the bombyx on my desk and my manuscript, open to page 102 and the scene where Heather writes the note implicating Ferland and McMillan.

  I was in the Canadian Tire of the town nearest to me that afternoon, shopping for new windshield wipers. Since I was already there, I decided to buy some of the hardware we needed to strengthen the fences, you can never have too much. I was putting it all in my cart when I noticed them — the woman and the son — in the hunting-equipment aisle. They were accompanied by Gilles Ferland, who likely did still hunt as he had a camo jacket in his cart, as well as a decoy for calling moose and a few other items plainly indicating that he didn’t plan to spend the fall sitting in his living room.

  I slipped into a side aisle so they wouldn’t notice me and wondered what I should do. And that was when the small woman walked past the end of my aisle with her son, recognized me, and dodged away. I needed to catch up with her before she disappeared so I could be sure that Ferland was real. I noticed her heading toward the exit. She was shod in tall, dirty boots, like the kind you wear fishing, but I couldn’t help seeing the outline of her toes under the rubber, the toes of devils, hypocrites, and liars.

  “Mrs. Ferland!” I shouted as she passed through the closing doors. Hearing my voice, she turned around sharply, grabbed her son by the arm and dragged him into the parking lot. By the time I was outside, a red truck was squealing its tires on the wet asphalt.

  This incident happened a few hours ago and I’m still in shock. I repeat to Holy Crappy Owl that he was right, that we were taken in, and Holy waggles, “I told you so, I told you so, it was written,” as the two sad sisters go to sleep in a corner of my study, the head of one resting on the other’s shoulder, and P. snores on the second floor, unaware that he was also deceived and now I am a genuine danger to him.

  * * *

  Heather frantically munches her way through the few pistachios remaining in the bottom of the container she always keeps in her car. The phosphorescent clock on the dashboard tells her she’s been there for around six hours, which is confirmed by the light slowly brightening the sky, but she’s convinced that she’s been in the clearing a lot longer than that, that young tree shoots will soon poke their way through the Buick’s floor to lick at the windshield and surface through the rusty roof, and that the place she’s in is not unknown to her, and it’s possible that the clock has shown 6:15 numerous times since the accident, even if her thigh is not yet healed, even if her scratches are still bleeding. Her knowledge of the surrounding area is far too intimate for her to have only spent one night there.

  She gets out of the car and sits down beside a pine tree, the gun between her legs and the axe by her side, wondering just what she should do: wait for her suspected assailant, or look for somewhere to take shelter? But where can a woman with no idea who she is, or where she comes from, find shelter? She clings to the few words that might give her some semblance of identity: “My name must be Andrée, Andrée A. I’m an injured woman, fleeing.”

  Repeating the words, she tries to view them from without and to see herself as separate from the words and not one entity with them. She strives to anchor herself in some sort of reality, but can’t make out her body, her face — still can’t see her face, even though she’s spent ages staring into the side mirror of the car, which broke from the impact of the accident and is dangling down the door: blue eyes, the iris encircled with yellow; fine, mid-length hair, naturally wavy; pale lips, and a high forehead partly hidden by uneven bangs. But all this is getting muddled, the lips are stretching out or thickening, the nose is lengthening, the face is becoming a mask, a caricature.

  “Jesus,” she spits out suddenly, which teaches her something else: she’s an injured woman who swears when things go wrong. And things are definitely going wrong, very badly wrong. Her injured leg is preventing her from concentrating and representing herself clearly in the world: me, me, maybe Andrée, lost, Andrée A. She doesn’t know what the A stands for; for indecision, maybe, or to feminize a name whose gender is determined by a silent vowel.

  As for her surname, she doesn’t even know its first letter. But she feels that her father is close by, in this forest that will soon reveal her real name to her. She can sense his presence in the smells around her, in the sun warming her feet shod in heavy boots, men’s boots, made for walking far away from the noise of inhabitated places, but which are currently no use whatsoever because of the wounded leg that will force her to crawl if she decides to leave, or to improvise crutches or a cane with broken branches. But it is becoming increasingly clear that she won’t leave, or at least not before she is certain that, wherever she goes, she’ll be able to confront the men who hunted her down. Her memory is empty but alert. She can sense the attackers’ imminent arrival.

  * * *

  How could I not have recognized Ferland’s wife, who challenged me with her weary gaze on the day before Christmas Eve from her living room window? Despite the distance, I observed the oval of her face, the blackness of her dyed hair, how much smaller she was than her sons. I’d seen her hand grip the younger boy’s shoulder, move a stray lock away from her forehead, but I didn’t put it all together.

  Gloria Ferland, as I will call her now for expediency’s sake — and because it’s impossible to separate her from Gilles, her dreadful husband — Gloria Ferland is one of those women whose face you forget as soon as you turn away, its evasive and empty eyes, too unremarkable for the memory of them to stick, the ordinary lips. Hers is a mask that dissolves when other people aren’t looking and disappears when the door closes on its banality. Gloria Ferland is the sort of person only distinguished by some lack in their physiognomy which, most often hidden, defines their entire identity.

  Unsettled by this observation, I wake up Holy Crappy Owl to tell him the little woman is called Gloria, and that you have to see her feet to understand her true nature. Crappy, barely emerged from the universe of his mad dreams, immediately snorts with laughter. “Gloria! Gloria! Gloria!” he screeches before intoning a song of his own invention about Gloria’s feet.

  VIII.

  I didn’t invent Gloria Ferland, nor did I wish for her to show up in my daily life, an appearance more accurately described as an intrusion, given the events that followed. I simply opened my door to her — and, along with her, somebody else I’d not created, a man who came into my house, poking and prying into all the objects around us, adding his own smell to the suddenly sinister atmosphere of the place, his marks on the wooden doors, and his prints on the fur
niture, embedded beneath the surface.

  The man’s trespassing, which surreptitiously violated the house to its very foundations, which stirred up the dust on the crumbling ground, has tipped the story into a world of back roads populated by crooks. This novel doesn’t belong to me anymore.

  December 2, 2015. I’ve just finished typing up my manuscript, word by word, sentence by sentence, page after page, going back through the seasons, reliving my moods, feeling once more the strange sensation of seeing a woman who could only be me at the wheel of a Buick driving toward dusk, and all this because, a few weeks ago, when P. and I were out just for a short time, the house was burgled.

  It was Thanksgiving Monday, the geese who’d managed to escape the hunters’ bullets were heading south, the sun was shining, and the sparrows singing. It was one of those days when it seemed nothing disagreeable could happen, and the car sped toward our house without my having any morbid thoughts at all about the final straight. Next to me, P. was humming an old blues tune and beating time on the dashboard. Everything seemed right with the world.

  As we approached the house, we noticed a blue vehicle driving out of the yard, not new, a pickup truck, but we weren’t really paying much attention because a lot of people turn around in our driveway due to the reassuring juxtaposition of seasons in front of and behind the arch. But I saw the guy’s face clearly, the driver with his bandit’s mouth, black glasses, goatee, and mid-length slightly curly hair that obviously hadn’t been brushed in some time. I stared straight at the dark lenses, and, as his appearance was not familiar, I forgot about it, decided I did not know the man.

  It was only when we’d gone inside and set our bags of groceries down on the table that we noticed the basement door had been smashed open. In that same moment the elder son came to mind, and I raced into my study to find that my computer had disappeared, as well as my hard drive and an old computer I kept in the drawer. P., who had rushed to his study, shouted out that his computer had also been stolen, as well as his binoculars and the fake gun he’d purchased years before when he was considering writing a gangster story.

  I wanted to set off in pursuit of the blue vehicle, like a fearless and irreproachable heroine — a woman who wouldn’t let anyone give her trouble, a cop in a Raymond Chandler story — but P. held me back. The guy was long gone and no doubt hiding in a barn, in a garage, or along the lane to the cabin. So instead we telephoned the real police, but they couldn’t do much either, what with our having been too stupid to note down the vehicle’s licence plate, at least that’s what the young policeman sitting at the kitchen table must have been thinking, sitting where the small woman had, though he’d not taken off his boots. Police officers never take their boots off, it would make them too vulnerable, and I couldn’t see his toes.

  He didn’t treat us like imbeciles, he was too polite for that. I would even say he was kind, he was nice, laughing at the dull jokes of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But he must have thought it, if only because everybody else thought it — that’s to say, P., me, Crappy, and the cats, who, luckily, were outside when the brute smashed down our two basement doors, an external one and then another leading up to the main floor, because you never know when bastards like that are going to show up with their dark glasses, goatees, and mouths that don’t laugh. If he’d touched the cats, I’d have killed him, I’d have tracked him all the way to the Amazon and turned into a vigilante, a character right out of a trashy novel, someone not nice at all, who doesn’t flinch away from anything and who’s not afraid of drawing her gun or unsheathing her knife, nor afraid to have blood spurt on her old-fashioned leather jacket.

  But the calico was in the woods when we got back — probably under the wild roses growing on the other side of the old fence — and the first cat was hiding behind the cedars, near the ditch claimed by indigenous vegetation. He’d come to meet me as soon as I was out of the car to tell me what he’d seen. He’d witnessed the elder son breaking into the house and was trying to explain what had happened, but I didn’t understand his meowing, his tetchiness, the indignation of a cat whose territory has been invaded by a crook.

  I’d come inside with P., a bag of groceries in each hand, and seen the basement door, with its latch flown right over to the shelf where we keep our gloves, mittens, penknives, compasses. I’d seen, beneath the cast-iron stove, the tray of cat grass that the thief knocked over when the latch gave way, and then the reproduction Manneken-Pis sculpture with the penis in the shape of corkscrew, a hideous thing, that was knocked over as well. And then I noticed that my computer was no longer on my desk. My heart started to race and then slowed down dangerously, to such an extent that I leaned on the table so as not to collapse among the white sheets of paper flying around me like the white laundry you see hanging outside on a spring day. That carried on for one or two minutes: red, white, red, white, until I grabbed the phone and dialled 911.

  I’ve just finished retyping my manuscript, a copy of which I’ve put in a safe place whose location I will only reveal under torture. But this doesn’t really solve my problem, because if my suspicions are correct, then my novel is now in the hands of Gloria Ferland, and she’s probably read it to her husband Gilles, who, has in turn no doubt passed it on to Herb McMillan during the time I took to type it out again and alter a few details — just tiny things, because it’s pointless trying to backtrack when a text is already out in the world. Once it’s written, it’s written, and Holy Crappy Owl is telling me I’m in a big mess here.

  * * *

  The elder of the two sad sisters was carried off by sorrow, may she rest in peace, but her shadow is still there in a corner of my study with the shadows of the bombyx and the wandering souls sketching themselves on the curtains. She’ll also be present in the living room of the building with endless turquoise walls, still sitting in the same place, motionless and silent and with the younger sister’s head lightly resting upon her shoulder; and the younger sister will also be motionless and silent, remembering the warmth of a living body, eyes now riveted on its absence, on the dreadful void of turquoise days.

  * * *

  While death was going about its business in the house of the sad sisters, Heather gathered branches to place in an open space near the Buick and then surround them with stones, some — the most beautiful ones — white, others grey, with the aim of lighting a fire, because the nights were getting colder despite the seeming inertia of time, and their dampness was penetrating her leather jacket, no longer enough to keep her warm. She knows that the fire might attract the very people she’s afraid of and alert them to her position, but she has no choice if she is to remain on guard and not succumb to the numbing effect of the cold. And she does still have her gun, her axe, and her determination — the desire to make it through the autumn augmenting her strength.

  She strikes one of the matches she finds at the bottom of her bag and cups her hands around it so that it doesn’t go out, because after this one she only has eleven matches left: eleven nights of fire. Then she huddles over the twigs she’s slipped among the branches, catching the flame one after another and communicating their heat to the smallest branches as they also start to catch, and Heather can breathe at last. She backs up, leans against the car, and will wait for tomorrow, unless the cold brings snow, because she’s afraid the two men will be able to track her scent in a northeast wind, in which case another day in this place would be impossible.

  * * *

  Vince has piled a load of dead leaves into a big metal barrel covered with a grill, and you can see the smoke of the fire blazing in the barrel from the road. As I get out of my car, a sudden gust of wind blows the smoke in my direction, and all I can see are the glowing embers at the bottom of the barrel through the tiny gaps in the metal.

  I skirt around the smoke and go over to Vince, who’s waiting for the fire to die down a little before he adds to the barrel the branches affected by Cherry Black Knot disease
he cut the day before. His eyes are red from the smoke and he has a large stripe of soot on his left cheek, like a long scar emphasizing the pallor of his face. He invites me to sit down on a log, hands me a cigarette, and amid the crackling of the leaves and the branches, we smoke in silence.

  We’re both aware that, from this point on, we are linked by the silent violence that carried Heather Waverley to her grave, and that the situation in which we find ourselves might just prompt the right words to allow us to penetrate the secrets surrounding her death. We’ll talk soon enough, when the fire can safely go out without our watching it and we go inside into the warm, because the wind that was just starting up when I arrived has become stronger, a south wind piercing our clothes and probably bringing on bad weather. For Vince too, there is nothing good in this wind, so he throws sand on the embers and decides he’ll burn what’s left of the leaves and branches tomorrow.

  Inside, our clothes smell strongly of fall smoke, and I bury my nose in my scarf, reviving the memory of a few dozen falls gone by that were also redolent of woodsmoke, as the bitter aroma of the coffee Vince is brewing mingles with the cinder perfume.