Back Roads

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Then, without giving me time to reply, Réal Morissette shifts into gear and carries on down into the village. I put on my four-way flashers, which intermittently tint the blowing snow orange, and drive along the verge hoping I’ll not be crashed into by a driver hurrying to get home before the storm stops him. Réal Morissette is right — in a couple of hours, none of the roads in the area will be passable, but I don’t care much about that right now because Réal has inadvertently revealed that he was the one who sent me the anonymous letter, that he was the person trying from the very beginning of this story to dissuade me from writing it. But it’s too late, because other people have written it in my stead.

  I brush off the snow covering my knees and thighs, turn the car around, and head for La Languette before I get stuck on the road halfway there. I’m alone on this road and its diminishing visibility, alone with my ghosts.

  * * *

  Heather is calling herself every name under the sun for not having thought of taking the old snowshoes no doubt still hanging in the shed adjoining the mountain house. She could turn back, but knows that any backward move would mean a return to the limbo she’s inhabited for far too long. Luckily, the snow is accumulating less rapidly in the forest that she knows like the back of her hand, having taken the paths along which she’s currently struggling dozens of times as a child.

  * * *

  In the thick of night, snow and wind are buffeting the heavy smoke leaving the chimney of Gilles Ferland’s cabin deep in the woods, and transforming it into curling grey forms taking on the shapes of tortured creatures, gargoyles and hydra, or gorgons whose manes detach from their skulls and wrap themselves around the branches whipping at the darkness of the forest.

  In the cabin, Gilles Ferland and Herb McMillan, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s at their feet, listen to the wind that is making the walls and roof creak so loudly it’s as if it wants to rip them right off. They’re both silent, both downcast victims of the worry such a storm and its blows incite in even the most hardened of people.

  “Shall we go out for a ride?” asks McMillan, and Gilles Ferland stands up without a word to get his helmet and snowmobile suit.

  * * *

  It’s 11 p.m. when Howard W. Thorne knocks at Vince Morissette’s door. One miscalculated move has him stuck in the snow, and he needs to borrow Vince’s vehicle. “I’ll come with you,” says Vince, and the two men stride out into the night, lowering their heads to protect them from the biting snow. They’re not really sure where they’re going and what it is they’re looking for, but the sense of urgency they feel is making a mockery of rational thought and telling them to act quickly. All that can be seen of them on the road are the car’s headlights, fuzzy beams moving silently forward in the blizzard.

  * * *

  The snow is so dense that I have to keep an eye on the fence posts along the side if I’m not to drive right off the shoulder, which is covered in thicker and thicker drifts that intermittently spread across the road and through which the car penetrates with a dull, soft sound. I don’t know what point I’ve reached nor if I’ll be able to travel much further before I get stuck, so I press on the accelerator in an effort to outdistance the snow and cleave its succession of waves like so many rocks struck by the hull of a ship in distress.

  At the intersection of what must be the Saint-Joseph Line and La Languette, a shape rises up in front of me. It might be Heather, it might be Jackson, or might even be one of those animals that, in fables, block your path to herald death’s arrival. And as the shape unfolds, I seem to see an eagle owl with enormous wings opening its beak and emitting a single hoarse cry as it splits the night with its flight. I brake, the bird’s wings sweep the sides of the car, and I plough into a white wall that crumbles with a crunching of supple branches.

  As the wall collapses, the man called P. wakes up from his disturbed sleep with a start, convinced that his nightmares prefigure some misfortune soon to befall him. Downstairs, the calico meows and the first cat, standing at a window that looks out over the wooden arch beyond which a thousand seasons unspool, looks out into the night with worried eyes.

  * * *

  The numbers on the phosphorescent dashboard clock show quarter after midnight, or quarter after noon, and there’s a bloodstain on the inside of the windshield covered with a thick layer of snow. An inky blackness surrounds me and I don’t know who I am, where I am, and why I am here. I feel my forehead, wet with some viscous substance, and turn on the windshield wipers, which struggle to clear the snow piled onto the window. All I can see before me are branches, lit up by two luminous cones shining obliquely through the powdery snow falling toward the ground with such velocity you’d think it was fleeing threats in the sky.

  It is quarter after midnight.

  I try to exit the car and a yowling sound escapes my chest. More blood on my right thigh displays the cause of my wail, at odds with the silence of the blurry night and paralyzing me for a few moments. Once the echo of the cry has receded into my beating heart, I remove my wool scarf and tie it firmly around my thigh, an action that drags out another cry that this time I suppress by biting my lips.

  I have to get out of the car, but the door refuses to open. Then I see a backpack on the back seat and the axe attached to it. I manage to grab hold of the backpack and drag it up and over into the passenger seat, where all of its contents fall out: sweaters, matches, woollen socks, the recently sharpened axe blade shining through the lot of them. I grab hold of it and shut my eyes as the glass smashes and a shard embeds itself into the tender skin of my right wrist.

  * * *

  At the intersection of two paths that the snow will soon cover, Heather Thorne thinks she hears a cry for help through the northeastern wind’s screaming. She can’t figure out the direction it’s coming from, but she’s certain it’s a woman’s cry, an injured woman she needs to locate before the men arrive, their faces drunk with the sky’s rage. She cocks an ear, holds her breath, and starts walking into the complicit wind that carried the voice to her.

  She has barely taken a few steps when she hears roaring sounds competing with the noise of the storm. Snowmobiles, she thinks, and points her gun straight ahead.

  * * *

  Gilles Ferland and Herb McMillan are driving at full throttle along the deserted road, intoxicated by a storm so powerful that earlier it made them feel as if the walls of Ferland’s cabin, besieged by the thundering frozen air, might fly away, that its planks of knotty pine might stretch so much that the space would lie open to the ghosts, soon to materialize, of which they were vaguely aware. They’ve now put the thundering behind them, and despite the din of the engines, their hollers reverberate in the night like shouts of victory over the power of the elements, over the spectres the wind has swept up, over everything that might restrict the liberty of those who choose to ignore the past’s constant haunting.

  On a different road, perpendicular to the one the snowmobilers are on, Vince Morissette and Howard W. Thorne curse as they get out of Morissette’s truck, having driven it into the ditch after hitting a snowbank and spinning around. The truck is now listing at a dangerous angle at the top of a slope they’d have quickly descended, tumbling into the river at the bottom as its icy waters rush forward, were it not for Morissette’s deft manoeuvring.

  The two men examine the vehicle, calculating their chances of getting it out of the ditch. Then, after exchanging glances, they decide to continue on foot, despite how thick the snow is and the effort the expedition will take. His hands already frozen, Morissette grips the left door of the truck and reaches inside to grab his mittens, gun, and the thermoses of cognac-spiked coffee he prepared. The ensuing slam of the door marks the departure of Heather Waverley Thorne’s father and lover into the murderous night.

  * * *

  I managed to get out of the car, but still don’t know where I am or how I got caught up in the storm. In the middle of the ra
ging weather, the accumulated sensations of nothing actually linking me to the forest around me, and of my being nothing but a suffering body with neither past nor future — as if I’d arrived in the world in this heap of metal being swallowed up by the snow, and was destined to remain forever by it — have resulted in this dull panic gripping me.

  Unable to contain my anguish any longer, I stamp angrily on the ground and start to scream. I sink, with the axe between my legs, into the white terror lacerating my departed memory, and then I hear an approaching roar, the noise of engines pushed to the max. I get up to shout again and then stop dead, halted by a premonition strangely resembling some nebulous memory. And then, as the roaring gets louder, the memory crystallizes, and I understand what’s coming: the roaring I hear is the roaring of snowmobiles driven by drunken men feeling invincible. The first is called Ferland, the second McMillan. As for me, my name is Heather, Heather Thorne.

  * * *

  Coming from the other direction, Heather advances toward the snowmobilers driving in circles in a field, tracing figure eights in the soft snow — symbols of infinity if you look at them horizontally. Then they shout loudly, laugh, howl like coyotes smelling blood. They have been made feverish by the storm and the alcohol and their feelings of invincibility, of being more powerful than the wind, of being freer than God. After they’ve been at it for a few minutes, one of them raises an arm and points to an opening in the forest, and they drive to it, bisecting the circles, loops, and eights the snow is quickly covering over; reclosing the gates of infinity.

  * * *

  The noise of the snowmobiles is becoming dangerously loud and I decide to walk deeper into the forest, even though this means leaving in my wake a trail of footsteps, the smell of urine, long drag marks from my injured leg, and branches broken with my axe. Entire sections of a past I don’t understand rush by me in the storm with crazy urgency and press themselves on me as the engines roar. The images speeding past are clear and disturbing, urging me to flee as far away as possible even as a curious sense of destiny convinces me not to leave the area where the snowmobilers are driving.

  I focus on the images in my mind, one of which will not leave me. It’s an image of a plucked owl yelling at me, Gun, Andrée, gun, gun, bang! and the bird keeps insisting, in its strident voice, Gun! It’s fluttering around the oppressive space of a purple-walled room invaded by a cloud of bombyx I am trying to push aside by throwing the axe in front of me as if it were a scythe. I swipe at branches, decapitate the bombyx, brown and white in the night, mixing in with the snow, and swing until my axe lands in a tree trunk and the owl’s squawkings cease.

  Andrée, the bird says, Andrée . . . I yank the axe out of the tree in which it is stuck and examine my right wrist, where a wound in the shape of a double A confirms my identity. I put a bit of snow on it and hear the laughter of the first and second men, Ferland and McMillan, who have now cut their engines and seem to be just a few metres away. My face is on fire as I resume my fitful walk and try to go faster. This time I’m heading in the same direction.

  * * *

  Gilles Ferland and Herb McMillan are passing a bottle of gin back and forth and laughing at obscene jokes before pissing in the snow and trying to trace the initials of the girl they’ve been jerking off over for months now, but the letters are clumsy and there’s a B for Beverley in the H for Heather, an A in the unfinished W for Waverley, and an undefined consonant with wobbly strokes in the T for Thorne.

  They zip up their flies, admire their work, and then, cupping their hands around their mouths, shout at the top of their voices, “Heather, Heather Waverley, Heather Beverley, my love,” this only increasing their laughter and obscene jokes.

  * * *

  Heather hears their voices calling Heather Waverley, Heather Beverley coming at her left and right through the blowing snow sweeping across the road and into the deepest crannies of the forest. The wind is confusing me, she thinks, the wind wants to make me mad. Seeking out the source of the echoing voices, she turns back the way she came, then hurries toward the centre — toward the spot where the voices converge and will meet fatally. Behind her, a few drops of blood the snow has not yet covered will indicate to the men tearing through the forest that an injured woman passed this way.

  * * *

  Ferland and McMillan had no trouble following Heather Waverley — Heather Beverley, Heather Heather, they really don’t care which. They followed the drops of blood and found Heather in the middle of the path, arms dangling by her side, staring, as if she were hypnotized, at a piece of wood in the form of an angel, a Virgin, and a Virgin turned angel with eyelids weighed down by the snow. McMillan takes Heather in his arms and whispers not-so-sweet nothings in her ear, “Fuck me, you have amazing breasts, fuck me, what a gorgeous mouth, fuck me, you have sexy hips. Fuck me, you smell good.” But the woman doesn’t respond.

  “Jesus, are you frozen where you stand?” says Ferland, who then trips in the rush to have his own turn holding her by the waist. In the same movement, he drags the motionless woman down with him and her head, covered with a red tuque, hits a sharp stone.

  Hot blood runs down my cold cheek, and the flakes of snow falling from the immense sky are illuminated, one by one, like thousands of tiny red-bodied flies. “Christmas is coming,” I say to myself, “Christmas and its twin owls dancing to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells.’ ” Then a man’s voice mutters that I’m pretending to have fainted, that I’m putting it on, for Christ’s sake, I’m faking it. The voice comes to me through a veil through which I can hear Jackson my love barking, calling out to me from the autumn forest.

  I slip between the trees, a winged woman who no longer knows pain, place myself on a gravel path over which orange caterpillars — Pyrrharctia isabella, the Isabella tiger moth — migrate, and then see a little girl playing hopscotch, One, two — one, two, a little girl with apple cheeks who could be me, Andrée, Heather, or Beverley, who could be childhood and carefreeness. One, two, three, she sings, her sneakers reaching the grey of a sky beneath another grey sky rolling its tousled clouds on the hill. I hold my hand out to the clouds and touch them at the exact moment when two booming gunshots resound in the space filled with the whistling of the storm.

  * * *

  With their bodies bent against the strength of the storm, Vince Morissette and Howard W. Thorne struggle forward, their clothes weighed down with snow, as best they can in the dawn’s barely perceptible light. In the time that has passed since they left Vince’s vehicle, their bodies have lost their heat and they feel as if they’ll never reach the place that a past they thought dead and buried is propelling them toward.

  Morissette is employing his gun as a cane in order to walk faster, but the wind keeps pushing him back while Thorne, out of breath, turns his back to the storm. He tries to tell Morissette they’re never going to make it just as a gust — carrying a familiar sound — bites at their reddened skin. They lift their heads sharply, and a silence born of their worst fears descends around them. Two sharp cracks shake the forest, immediately followed by two more gunshots.

  Clutching his chest with both hands, Howard W. Thorne cocks his ear and begs Vince to hurry. “Go, go on, run, please, I’ll catch up in a few minutes.” Vince hesitates for a moment, worried Thorne is having a heart attack and that he’ll be found half-buried in the snow, mouth frozen in pain from the cardiac arrest that felled him as he was trying to call out Heather Waverley’s name one last time. But given Thorne’s insistence, the younger man obeys and abandons him on the invisible road. Thorne watches Morissette slowly disappear into the blizzard and, uttering God’s name, lets himself fall softly back.

  With his body arched to withstand the fierce gusts of wind feeding on the open space around him, Vince Morissette slowly, despairingly, plows on. The storm, like an animal in its death throes, is angrily contorting itself and driving him back, and the snow as high as his knees makes him feel as if he’s sinking with
every step he takes in the deserted stretch of cold dust trying to swallow him.

  After a few more minutes of desperate walking, he finally finds shelter in the undergrowth where the snow is not as dense and the wind’s roaring can’t bite at him. Clumsily, he attempts to wipe away the snot that has dribbled down to his chin with his cold-stiffened mittens. Then he sets off again toward the source of the sound of the gunshots. Near the track dug out by a stream, he sees traces of footsteps at last, and then marks left by snowmobiles’ caterpillar tracks. He gathers his strength and runs in the direction of the footsteps and, as Howard W. Thorne asked, toward the place where the violence of thirty-five years before might finally come to an end.

  * * *

  The two swans take off, I think — as well as the wooden angel-Virgin. Beauboule traverses a patch of fog, and writes his name, “Beauboule,” and the rain releases me, a few light drops on my burning lips and forehead.

  * * *

  Vince Morissette is the first to recognize Heather’s anorak, its scarlet red plainly visible amid the thousands of trees bending beneath the whiteness. “Heather,” he shouts, but the anorak doesn’t move. He reaches her and immediately understands the horror that has plunged Heather into her torpor. A few metres ahead of her, two men lie belly down in the snow, near a woman with closed eyes, her head leaning on a rock where she appears to be resting.