Cape Breton Road (36 page)

In the distance a single windmill, the wind was blowing hard but the blades were not turning. He was thirsty, he should’ve stopped at that general store like she’d wanted, got gas.

Had Starr already opened that cupboard over the sink, taken his time selecting a tumbler, raising it first to the ceiling to see if his nephew had wiped the glass clean? He would open the tap, he would not fill the glass right away but run his fingers under the water, feeling almost immediately that surprising cold. No reason for Starr to hesitate. Free of silt. Nothing swirling there, nothing to the eye.

On the upper side of the dam Innis was approaching lay a cold nervous lake, its surface darkly blue, charged with small, rapid waves. He turned down a short road to the windward shore hoping for a drink. The wind was immediately cold and steady when he got out of the car. The sun seemed to have no heat, though the air was bright. Deep behind the beach driftwood had banked up high, white and dry as bones against a concrete wall. Hundreds of pieces must have been driven there by storms, jammed into a long windrow of bleached wood. Newer wood not yet dry was scattered along the shoreline. Innis ran his hand over a piece like huge misshapen antlers, its grain a satiny silver, polished and damp. Tree stumps, most of that driftwood, and the lake was still giving them up, working them loose like teeth from the flooded, cut-over woods. He couldn’t see any wood floating, maybe they were still
submerged in that dark water, like seabeasts, each one different, malformed, rising from the depths. Sunlight sank only a short way into the clear water, at first faintly yellow, then a rusty tinge deepening into a red darkness. Iron oxide. The lake’s surface seemed jittery in the wind, excited somehow, hurried, its choppy waves striking the shore in quick succession. You’ll still find trout up there, he’d heard. Hard to believe down in that bloodred darkness there’d be fish.

Surely it was fresh enough to drink, only the rock colored it, and Innis cupped out a few cold mouthfuls tasting faintly of metal. Maybe Starr had deserved a touch of poison. But just who deserved what, and why, was still a mystery.

The squalls seemed to have passed, shreds of cloud cooling across the sun. Could this be a thin place like the priest had mentioned? He picked up a piece of wood whose whorl of knots caught light like wet stone. There were interesting rocks lying about, fractured in attractive ways. He patted his pocket for a sketchpad but he’d forgotten where he put it, in his bag maybe back in the car. But how would he draw this anyway, this strange lake where all the blood had run? An army had been through here and what remained was the blown rock, the ruined trees, the concrete channels, the dams, the stilled windmill. There was no room in this wind for drawing, the wind was growing colder, it cut into him and he was glad to shut himself away in the car, every time that engine shot into life, he was comforted.

But signs for a road out, where were they? He drove carefully across a damn of earth and stone, a deep lake on one side, on the other a mean plunge to a thin afterthought of a brook, its water tracing off into a valley, a mere leak beneath
the dam. From this maze of roads, any exit at all, he didn’t care right now where it would land him as long as he could continue south.

Scrub spruce and alders stretched away and away, and there was the bright wet grass of bogs, a stunted terrain to which had been brought dams, and deserted roads to get lost in fast, they would suddenly merge with the ground as if they had turned into the earth. There’d been a big fire across the Barrens back in the sixties, Finlay said, roared right over it, and the trees were stunted anyway, always small up here where the rocky soil is thin. A scrabble of dense little trees no bigger than they would ever get in this windy space, branches curled and huddled, roots twisted into the soil. When he deadended in a muddy clearing, he turned the car around, spinning clay, and retraced, he was certain, the same road, but once again other roads opened into it enticingly, they looked the same, and he bounced down one side road, then another, ending like the one before in a pile of bulldozed stones and he had to turn the mudsplashed Caddy again. He’d bottomed it already too many times, the muffler had a low rumble when he gunned the engine, a sound that in high school he would have thought cool but now it was a flaw, a worry, in this fine automobile. A highway car. That thought amused him at first, so sure of this car, no way you could keep it off the highway for long, but its shocks were intended for good pavement, not ruts and gravel and rainholes. Main road, mean road, little difference here.

He fingered out the roach stub from his breast pocket and lit it, sucked its smoke in deep. There was poisoned water everywhere, wasn’t there, diluted versions of it, people drank it every day, Starr was not putting hemlock in his mouth right
now, the plant was a long long way from him, its stalk, its stems, even its deadly juice. Maybe. Wind jostled the car. Jesus, there was not a road sign anywhere, who was all this designed for, God? He took a turn where a road looked wider, better graded. Was that a human being, had he spotted a man, dark, solemn, maybe an Indian, fishing below the road half-hidden in the thick bushes, casting high into a brook? Innis was not sure. Of course the man would see the car and ask him questions, like what in the hell did you bring a Cadillac up to the Barrens for? He didn’t want to leave the car anymore, he felt safer moving, any temptation to stop quickly vanished. Conversation? For what? Who are you, where you from?
Co leis thu?
He was in the high Barrens now, had to be, best for berries, they said, maybe he could find some. He could see a long way, the windbeaten trees as low as bushes, some road just a tan scar in the distance. He stopped to pan his telescope across the land, but there was nothing it could pull close enough to matter. He went on until the road he was following quit in a small cleared turnaround and he sat there idling. With the window cracked, the wind whistled over the car, it was still August, for Christ sake, wasn’t there a touch of summer left to lift him up a little? In his mouth an aftertaste of the lake, a tinge of iron. He scooped out the contents of the glove compartment and found half a roll of stale mints. He popped them all in his mouth, cut the engine. Wintergreen. The Captain’s breath. How much gas would it take to get him back to the highway, if he could find it? Encirclement was creeping into him and he would have to beat it back, worse than being lost in the woods last fall: these were roads and roads took you places, they didn’t lock you in, they didn’t
dazzle you, make you stupid. He folded his jacket into a pillow across the steering wheel. Just a few winks, he was hungry but resting his head, his eyes, seemed to matter more, clearing his mind. He could manage only a dozing, fitful parade of his unease, sleep would not let him arrive, anywhere. He slid down sideways to the seat, his mouth agape with weariness, eyelids trembling. Starr’s white shirts flew on a clothesline, three of them, sleeves snapping, pins could not keep them, they writhed away in the wind one by one.

His face felt mashed when he woke, his eyes gritty, squinting at the long late sun as he stood outside the car to piss, wind shoving at his back. Maybe Starr had taken no tainted water yet, not run a tap at all during the day, if he’d gone to The Mines. There were good reasons why he wouldn’t have put any in his mouth yet, that tiny cloud of poison was still diffusing, slowly, invisibly into that long hill to the house, under the road, then diagonal through the front field, a long run of line, so much water coursing through it, backed up behind the taps. Kitchen. Bathroom. A spigot near the back door. And the toilet. How many flushes would …? Maybe it was all there, collected in one small space, and something as innocent as a piss would disperse it, that few pints or quarts or gallons of danger. Suppose Starr simply was not thirsty for water? There were three beers in the fridge. Distinctly. Three brown bottles of Moosehead Ten Penny Ale, Innis could describe if asked the design of the label, the logo, the color of gold, the styles of lettering, the name, the origin of the brewery, the percentage of alcohol, higher than beer in the States. Starr liked a beer sometimes first thing in the door. But the weather was not warm, he wouldn’t reach for a Moosehead
today grumbling about the sticky, windless air, wind was everywhere and it carried autumn, chilling summer away. Autumn light. Warm, yet cold on your face.

He tried to concentrate, he couldn’t be fooled anymore by roads that went nowhere. He’d been trying to get off that Cape Breton Road, hadn’t he, the one that ran from here to Boston and beyond and back again, a great circle of sentiment and memory, of love and anger and disappointment and hope, leading back to this Island, even to here?

The prospect of darkness had focussed his mind, he found he was moving beyond the Barrens, the trees were coming taller, the road straighter but monotonous. Stacked pulpwood appeared at the roadside, this had to lead to a highway. He was daring to pick up speed, the muffler grumbling louder, when the headlights caught the dark brown hide of an enormous animal, like suddenly encountering a zoo creature, a runaway from a circus, its size seemed so out of place in front of his car, claiming the center of the road. Innis skidded to a halt, headlights freezing the moose as it wheeled its great head around, like a comical horse with its bristly dewlap, exaggerated snout. Innis expected it to flee like a deer but the horn, that smooth Cadillac horn, seemed only to arouse it, it lowered its immense rack of antlers, then, with a deep grunt, reared up impossibly high, all belly and legs, a mighty bull. Innis reversed hard but not before its hooves thumped heavily on the hood, he kept backing up until he felt the impact of the ditch, his head flew back, the Caddy suddenly askew, stopped, stalled. He could hear the moose crashing away through the trees. Holding his whiplashed neck, he turned the engine over and over until it started and then listened to what he was
afraid of, wheels whining in the wet ditch, spitting out mud and stones until the car barely rocked. The moose had smashed one headlight, the other was angled upward, illuminating uselessly the high branches of a tree.

Innis sat in the listing car, the thought of leaving it he could not handle, not yet. Bugs danced in the cockeyed light. Was that a wisp of fog or his own dust settling? He punched every button on the dash, the radio leapt from white noise to white noise, the aerial withdrew into the hood, the fan breathed cold air, he lowered all the windows, then raised them shut. Shit. A goddamn moose, and no Bullwinkle either, it must’ve been ten feet high, pissed off. Innis was sure he’d been on a road out, all he’d need have done is keep going. To a gas station, a house, a phone, anyone’s phone. Starr, don’t drink the water from the tap, just don’t, don’t ask me any questions, never mind where I am, goodbye. Goodbye.

The darkness was unbelievable, even as his eyes adjusted to it he was straining to keep to the road. But oh God, the stars, they blinded him, they made him stumble, they were brighter than the night with Claire when he spun slowly in that midnight water, weightless, certain he would soon feel her against him. He looked behind him just once, the Caddy’s headlight like a carnival beam, barely visible in trees. Jesus, he was thirsty, he’d never been so thirsty, there had to be a brook along here, why not take the woods, didn’t he know them, weren’t these the same trees that grew on St. Aubin, everywhere here? A terror seemed to flame through him, furiously cold, like his hands in the spring water. He was going downhill, the woods were thicker than any back home, but a hill would lead him somewhere he needed to go if he could stay on his feet,
where was his walking stick, lying in the upstairs hallway, he was afraid of tumbling headfirst, of sinking in a bog, he had no gas left, his legs could not match the obstacles, the dead-wood, the tangles of tough young trees, but he knew too that this momentum would drive him the rest of his days, to better or worse, he saw flowers, yellow, were they primroses, his mother wanted him to dig holes for roses, outside there by the back window, Innis, please, I can’t get a spade into that soil, it’s hard as cement, but his pal was waiting at the curb and Innis didn’t want to be seen putting rosebushes in the ground, they were blooming even, cream and red and yellow, petals dropping to the pavement, but he regretted it now, that he hadn’t done that little thing for her, that if nothing else, roses in the garden she could look at, and she had tried anyway to plant them herself but they turned to brittle sticks and thorns. He tripped on a tree root, his knees dug into dirt, his palms, the breath knocked out of him, but he was up again, wiping his eyes clear, that had to be a light he saw, it was, yes, and he pushed on toward it, crashing drunkenly, never taking his eyes from it, it had to be a house, a dog was barking sharply, or was it a fox, there would be a telephone there, and he could crank out those rings, crank them like a fire call, loud and long, and Starr would count them out without even thinking, four-ring-three, and he would get up from wherever he was, the big chair in the parlor, the kitchen table, maybe even his bed, what time was it anyway, and he would say hello, and Innis would say, It’s me. It’s me, Innis.

D. R. M
AC
D
ONALD
was born on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. In 1969 he received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, where he now teaches. In 1983 he was awarded an NEA Grant in Literature for
Eyestone
, a collection of short stories. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram Merrill Award, and an O. Henry Award.