Drive (11 page)

I was in a bad mood, but I wasn't going to play his game today. I ignored him and tried to move ahead.

“Hey, Friesen. Ever ask your mom why she married your dad?”

The strange question caught me, made me look back against my will.

“Because Mennonites are so fucking stupid they believe babies take five months.”

My face was suddenly burning. I took a step toward him, the school and my group fading away.

“I don't think I heard you right. In fact, I know I didn't.”

I was big in that hallway. The walls seemed to be squeezing the breath out of me, but Chris was bigger and he held his ground.

“Then I'll keep it simple – French slut.”

I hit him, exploded at him in a furious charge. We might have crashed into people on the way down but I didn't notice. If Chris landed me a few times, I didn't feel it.

It took three male teachers to drag us apart. The bus back to Ile-des-Sapins didn't wait for me. Before he left, Mr. Wiebe made sure I knew I had the rest of the week off – a suspension.

“I just can't believe this, not from you, Jens,” he kept saying, mad and hurt at the same time. He didn't understand: there were things you didn't do to my family.

They tried to make us say how it started.

Sitting straight in my chair, fingers locked on my lap, I said I didn't remember.

“And what about you, Chris?”

He looked at me. My jacket was torn and the left side of my face had begun to sting with a scrape where he'd cuffed me good. But I wasn't afraid of him and I let him see it.

“I don't remember,” Chris muttered.

While we were in the office, they phoned our homes for someone to come get us.

Please not Dad, I prayed. Self-control. I'd really blown it this time.

It was Mom who came, her pale skin even whiter than usual, dark hair pulled back, her delicate features looking sharp and awake. But she didn't make a fuss over my cut and she didn't cry. We got in the car and pulled onto the highway home.

“I'm sorry, I'm really sorry,” I said, and I was. Not that I'd hit Chris, because I still felt he deserved it, but that I'd probably embarrassed her, made her come get me, given people something to gossip over.

“I want to know what that was about,” Mom said.

I felt myself flush. There were things you never said to your mother, words you never used in front of her. But this was even worse than that.

“It was stupid,” I said hurriedly. “It was nothing.”

“People don't fight about nothing – or you don't.”

“I don't want to talk about it, all right?!” I was getting mad. I was just trying to protect her.

My mother swung over onto the gravel shoulder, thrust the shift into park and put on the blinking hazard lights.

“Then we'll sit here until you do,” she said simply.

For minutes we waited, engine idling. I shifted in the front seat, feeling huge and awkward. Why did she have to know? Why couldn't I just be punished? Underneath, it was more than that. I was fifteen. I thought about sex a lot. I talked about it a lot with my friends. But there's this mental circuit that keeps you from thinking about sex and your parents at the same time. It just seems so impossible.

And yet they were both in the car with me. The heat was on and my skin was curdling. I was trying to think of the least painful way out of this.

“Was it about you?” Mom said finally.

I shook my head.

“Was it about Daniel?”

“It was about Dad,” I blurted. “Chris said that maybe he isn't…you know, my real dad.” I
grinned sheepishly and shrugged. “I know, it's so stupid. People will say anything to bug you. I don't usually pay attention to garbage but…he caught me by surprise. Pissed me off.”

There was no sound except the engine, and the rush of a passing car. I was waiting for her to say something but she was looking at her hands.

“I'm really sorry,” I finished. “It won't happen again.”

“But you might hear it again,” she said softly. “From other people.” She looked at me, dark eyes clear and careful. “Jens, I had another… boyfriend. I had a few boyfriends, all at the same time,” she started.

She talked about growing up in the town of Antelier with her sisters, four Catholic girls living with their silent mother, all under the watchful, possessive eye of their father, Gerard. Jewels in his crown, he called his daughters. He was so strict, so old-fashioned that people talked about it; even the priest told Gerard to lighten up.

There was no money for university, so each of the girls got a job right out of high school. But they still lived at home; their father wouldn't hear of anything else. The sisters took every opportunity to get out of the house. My mother said she wanted to be liked.

She got pregnant. Not a big deal for a twenty-
year-old girl living anywhere else. My mother came home from work one day to find her clothes scattered over the front lawn. Gerard wouldn't give her a suitcase. He wouldn't even open the door. She had to ask a neighbor for plastic garbage bags to gather her things in.

“There was my winter coat, everything,” Mom said. “It was too heavy to carry. I had to drag the bags down the street. I was so embarrassed I thought I was going to die.”

She didn't know what else to do, so she took her things to the home of the kindest man she had dated, and told him the truth. She moved in and two months later they got married and moved to Ile-des-Sapins. Gerard never spoke to her again.

I was sick, the images swirling in front of me the way they do at a cliff edge. It must have been awful for her; it was awful for me now. I felt as if my whole life was falling back in a sudden, dizzying slide. I scrambled desperately after it, trying to grab the most important thing.

“Is he my father or isn't he?” I broke in.

“I don't know,” she said.

“How couldn't you? Women know these things! You're the ones who tell us.”

“Jens, you're upset…”

“There's tests,” I said. “It's just blood, right? Dad and I could go to the doctor today…”

“He won't do it.”

“Why not, for Christ's sake?!”

She grabbed my arm. “Listen! Listen to me. He loves you. This is his way of showing it, proving that it doesn't matter.”

“It matters to me.” I threw myself against the door and stumbled out, almost slid down into the snow-filled ditch. But I pulled myself up and started to walk.

The prairie spring wind blasted my coat open, traced icy fingers over my sweaty body. I marched on anyway. I felt like someone else, or some big animal lumbering forward, the rage and hurt gathering in my chest, rising up my throat into the two words I knew I shouldn't say.

But Chris Butler had been right. About everything.

“Jens! You are not walking home. Get in the car.”

The passenger window was open. She was driving slowly along beside me, one hand on the wheel but leaning toward me, worried.

“I can't,” I said. “Not yet.”

The danger must have been in my face. She drew back just a bit. “All right. I'll meet you up ahead. But do up your coat. You're going to get sick.”

It was too late, but I zipped my jacket obediently. She watched me for a moment, then
pulled onto the road again. She drove to a sign about half a kilometer ahead and stopped, waiting. My gaze fastened on the distant taillights beaming back at me like two red eyes.

I had always known how to want things. As a kid, I started getting ready for Christmas before Halloween, leafing through catalogs, poring over the brilliant photographs. I never had a big list; sometimes it was just one special thing. But I could get lost in time on that page, looking and wishing, my fingers leaving damp marks on the paper.

I had wanted my driver's license, and I wanted Mona Perenthaler. Late at night, the room dark and quiet except for Daniel's deep-sleep breathing and my own, faster and more feverish, wanting her in color and 3-D and stereo, wanting her so badly I could make it happen.

And it was all dust. On that cold, windy Manitoba highway in April, I realized that what I needed – all I'd ever wanted – was to be the son of the best man I knew.

I was shaking by the time I reached the car. A deep chill, I guess. The wind had pulled water from my eyes, streaked it over my face that was too cold to feel it.

I got inside.

“I don't want anyone to know,” I said. “Don't tell Dad about today.”

She hesitated, biting her lip.

“I'm not sure…”

“Yes, you can! I think you owe me.”

She should have slapped me. I could hear the snotty tone in my voice but I couldn't stop it, any more than I could stop another resentment, like poison, brewing under my skin.

We drove home in silence. I heard the guitar as soon as I opened the back door. Daniel was playing it on his bed but he looked up when I walked in.

“What took you so long? I thought we were going to Gooey's. We're still going, right?”

“Get out,” I said.

“What?”

“Get the fuck out of my room!”

He stood up, almost white with shock, still clutching the neck of the guitar. I never talked like this – not to him, not to anybody.

“Jens…”

“Right now!” I grabbed the guitar case and swung it roughly out into the hallway. I seized the pillow off his bed and threw it out after him. Then the quilt, then the sheets, balled up and pitched out.

“Mommm!” He went running to the kitchen and I heard their voices, fast and furious, in French. As always, I didn't know what they were saying but for the first time I didn't care.
They couldn't stop me. Books and models and his stack of
Guitar Now
magazines, everything that was my brother's littered the hallway in a hurricane sprawl. I had just carried out one of his dresser drawers when I saw him.

He was backed down the hallway, as close as he dared come, hands clenched into fists. But he was twelve years old and no match for me; neither of them were. Behind him in the light of the kitchen I could see my mother, arms wrapped around her waist as if she was holding herself up. Daniel was so mad I don't think he knew he was crying.

“You can't do this, Jens. That's my room, too!”

I flipped the drawer, socks and shirts tumbling onto the pile. Then I turned inside and shut him out.

“I never did anything to you.” Yelling at me through the door, hoarse with hurt disbelief. “I never did anything!”

There was a cassette in my tape player and I turned it on and up, loud. I fell onto my bed and squeezed the pillow around my face. It caught the sound that tore out of me, the sound of me ripping apart. I wasn't the man I'd wanted so badly to be. But Daniel was, or he would be. No matter what he grew up into, he'd always be sure of who he was. And I didn't hate him. I just
couldn't bear the sight of him.

And he wasn't the only one. I'm sure Mona Perenthaler never understood what happened, how I could go from hot to cold in one afternoon. There would be other girls, eventually, but it would never be the same. I'd left that part of me on the highway. It wasn't Mona's fault but I couldn't tell her.

Somewhere in the dark I made myself a promise. I decided I couldn't prove I was my father's child but I could deserve it. I could earn it. If I tried hard and kept trying, I could be something.

I just needed it to happen fast.

I woke up hurting, my muscles raw from a night on the ground. It had been a long time since I'd slept in a tent. Every part of me that wasn't burrowed inside the sleeping bag was chilled right through, even though I was still in my clothes. But I didn't try to go back to sleep. I rolled up onto my elbow to look at my brother.

We were so close that our sleeping bags almost lapped over each other. Daniel's dark hair was a mess and he was still in his clothes, too. I had a few inches and fifty pounds on him, but last night it had been all I could do to get him from the truck to the tent, a flashlight in one hand and holding him up with my other arm. Now, in the dim light, he seemed old, the morning's beard like a shadow on his skin.

I was scared. Last night wasn't a good time
that had slipped over the edge. He'd been drinking at a dead run, as much as he could get, as fast as he could get it. The edge was the goal.

A tight band around my chest was squeezing the breath out of me. I knew I should take him home right away, tell Mom she was right, and admit I didn't know what to do. Except I was afraid Dad had been right, too. Daniel's problems were my fault. I struggled with the panic, like drowning.

You can't fix it, Jens. You can't take back four years.

But I could make it up to him. I could sell seven hundred tapes; I'd already sold thirty-five. I'd beaten my last night's goal by seventy-five percent, and if I was just smarter and tried harder I could do it. I had to do it.

I remembered the money, the 375 dollars from the Fender. There was no way Daniel should be hanging onto it now. I should have slipped it away from him last night, just to prove to him how easy it was to lose, especially in that condition. It occurred to me that the lesson might still work.

My brother was lying on his back. I shrugged off my sleeping bag and crept over, shivering a little. It seemed so sneaky.

You're not stealing anything, I told myself. You're just proving a point.

Crouched on my knees, I nudged his left shoulder, gently at first, then firmer. Success! Daniel rolled up onto his side, the sleeping bag riding with him. I leaned over him and reached down into the warm cocoon, carefully groping for his wallet.

His head twisted back suddenly, eyes squinting into mine.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I had to think fast. I pressed on his stomach, in the vicinity of his bladder.

“Time to get up!”