Whirl Away (12 page)

One of the worst? A guy I picked up almost next to my hotel in Bathurst, a big burly guy in a jean jacket who must have seen me loading my sample cases into the trunk, because he tried to rob me until I opened the trunk for him and he realized he'd just won a year's supply of high-octane sports drinks. More than a couple of those a day and he'd have been jitterbugging like a crazy thing around the back of whatever police car they finally put him into. I don't think he even realized he was a hitchhiker until he saw the suitcases going into the trunk—guys like him give the whole bunch of them a bad name.

And then there was Lisa. The worst one of all.

She was almost in the middle of the road when I saw her first, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, and it was pounding down rain, halfway down the Salmonier Line about as far east as you can go on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. I'll tell you, May isn't always the friendliest month in that province, not even the last week of May when everyone else in my sales district has all the leaves out on the trees already. I was coming around a curve at the bottom of a long hill, coming around the curve fast the way you do when it's a little after seven-thirty on a dark spring morning, full of
rain, and there's nothing else in sight. You watch for moose that hour of the day, not for chop-cut dyed pixies in soaking-wet Levi's.

And there she was, looking right at my car and waving her arms over her head in that frantic way that means anything from “Give me a lift to the store, would ya?” to “My parents' car is over the embankment and they're trapped down there.”

So I stopped, and she came around to the driver's side window, a little slip of a thing like a drowned rat, and she struck her hip off the mirror, hard—I could see that in her face, the flash of pain, and then she put her left hand down and rubbed where she'd hit.

“I'm trying to get back to the cabin,” she said.

“What cabin?”

“I don't know. The cabin. I haven't been out here before, so I'm not really sure. Can you give me a lift?”

There are cabins off the Salmonier line, alright, a fair number of them, and I can tell you just where the side roads go off, because I've driven by them more than a few times. I mean, even if you're on your own on the road all the time anyway, sometimes you like to turn off the main drag and see how the other half lives. You know, the ones with houses and families and cottages and Jet Skis and the cold beer on a big deck next to the barbecue. But there weren't cabins where she was, just a few miles above where the road goes across the Salmonier River. She was close to the gas station, and I looked in the mirror before I stopped and there was nothing back there behind me but empty, wet road.

It was pretty clear she was drunk, or at least had recently been drunk. There was a smell coming off her, a smell like plums or something, the smell that always lets you know someone's been drinking. I looked in the mirror again, hoping someone else would be coming, that maybe I could pass the buck, get moving and let her take her chances with the next car. It was still pretty dark, and the spruce trees come right down to the road there, so it all looked like something out of Little Red Riding Hood. I was just waiting to see the wolf, and meanwhile the girl was cold and wet enough that she had started to shiver.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's see what we can do.” And I reached across and unlocked the passenger door.

She walked around, and I watched as she trailed her hand, the tips of her fingers, along the edge of the hood as if her balance depended on the contact. She got in, fell into the front seat really, her hair all stringy and down around her face, soaking wet. I wondered for a moment about the seat, pushed the thought away, looked straight at her. She had a small face, framed in by her hair, a snub nose but pretty, and she was right on that age line where her face was changing into what it would look like for the rest of her life. That spot where you lock down the laugh lines or a permanent pout. Blue eyes that would be prettier if they managed to focus a little better.

“Paul Lambert,” I said, and I stuck out my hand like we were being formally introduced somewhere. She just looked at it for a moment, like it was a fish she was trying really hard
to focus on but wasn't really interested in touching, and then grabbed it.

“Lisa Rhodes.”

I'll admit it's not the brightest thing I ever did, telling her my real name and everything. Or any of the rest of it—none of it was really bright. I know it's always easier looking backwards, when you can look at any one of those hundreds of spots where everything could be different, where you could have said, “Well, that's it, then, have a nice day,” and you could just walk away, take a different turn.

But that's not the point.

“I've been walking on this damn road for hours, and it hasn't stopped raining once,” she said. It looked like she was telling the truth: she was soaked through, enough so that I could see the lines of her bra under her shirt, and on both sides of the road all of the spruce trees were pulled downwards from the weight of the water on their branch tips.

“Where were you going, anyway?” I asked.

“I was up at the cabin, some friend of David's place. Over there.” She waved her hand over her shoulder. “All guys. All drunk. You can imagine where that was going.” She looked confused for a moment, as if she had lost her train of thought, and then her face cleared a bit. “So I started walking back to town. I think back to town.”

“Town's an hour's drive,” I said. “I don't know how far it would be walking.”

“Whatever. I guess I thought they were supposed to come looking for me, right?” The girl was looking out the
window as rain poured down the outside of the glass. “And maybe they were going to apologize for being such dicks.”

With her inside the car and the windows rolled up, the smell of booze was much stronger. It was the kind of smell that would get you into the back seat of an RCMP cruiser for a date with the Breathalyzer, if a cop pulled you over for speeding or no turn signal or something.

She leaned against the window then, and it made it seem as though just reaching the front seat was the end of a long climb, and she was perfectly happy with staying put and thinking over how hard done by she was. Like she was more concerned about how it was everybody else's fault that she'd gotten into this jam than she was about how she was going to get out of where she was now.

Guys, you know—we like to jump right into problem solving. Even if no one's asked us to solve anything yet.

“I can't run you back into town—I've got places I've got to be this morning—but maybe you can go back to the cabin. Maybe they're all sleeping it off by now.”

She didn't answer.

“Which way did you come from?”

“Don't know. It was dark. You're right—they should be sleeping by now. We were doing tequila shots at four and Dave had already passed out when I left. I just stumbled out and kept walking. I only found the highway 'cause a car went by and I saw the lights.”

She would have needed those headlights. People who work all the time in the city, they don't really know about dark. Out on a highway without street lights, rain clouds covering
the stars and any moon there might be, you're lucky if when you stop for a piss you can still find your zipper. I tried to picture her making her way along the road, one foot on the pavement, the other on the gravel, just to keep moving in a straight line. Lose your way just a bit in the black and the next thing you know, you're right in the middle of the road. I had my alternator go once, night driving on the highway just up from Gambo, and when the battery went dead, it was like I'd gone blind or something. I used my cellphone—not to call anyone, not way out there, but to use the light on the display to get my stuff out of the trunk and wait for a car to come along.

“Do you remember coming down a hill,” I asked her carefully, “or did you just walk along the flat?”

“Down a hill, I think,” she said, and then she smiled a bit for the first time. A little lopsided, but it sure brightened up her face. In a nice way.

“There are a couple of places—back at the Deer Park, or maybe the Colinet Road. Any of that sound familiar?”

“No. The cabin's brown, I think, and there's a white pickup out front. Dave's truck. Big truck.”

I told her we could take a look, that I'd drive her back up the hill and we could see if she recognized the place. By then the rain was coming down in sheets again, and if anything, the sky was getting darker. Water was rushing downhill at us in the ruts on the pavement, and when we turned in the Deer Park, the trees were whipping around in the wind. We drove past a few cabins, then a few more, sometimes just driveways, and the puddles were hiding bigger and bigger potholes the
farther back into the woods we got. I'd point to a place and she'd look, shake her head and rest the side of her face against the window—and every time, she seemed more and more resigned.

“I've only been there once,” she said thickly. “If I see the truck, I'll know it.”

“Are you sure you came downhill?”

“I think so. I dunno.”

The air in the car was getting strong, and then the rain was slacking off again, so I opened the window and swung into a driveway to turn around. “We'll try down on the Colinet Road,” I said, but she didn't answer. I thought for a moment she might have been sleeping.

After that, the conversation got a little bit strained. Well, her part of the conversation did. I kept talking, and every now and then she'd grunt or throw a word in somewhere. We had a twenty-minute drive or so in the other direction, and I told her about being on the road, about hotel rooms, the whole thing. How you meet lots of people but have to make your mind up about them really quickly, because you don't get to spend much time with them before you're gone again. And sometimes she'd rouse herself for a minute or two, enough once to tell me that she had finished school and had been working at everything from landscaping to home care, trying to find something that suited her. About her basement apartment, and how she wanted to get a car of her own.

I think I told her about ten times as much. Heck, I even told her about Fish, and then I told her I thought she was
one of the ones that was all right, but by then she was really drifting—when she looked at me, it was like only one eye was focusing on me at all, the other one kind of drifting away as if it had lost the only line between boat and wharf. Not a pretty look for anyone. We passed more cabins, she shook her head, and we got to the end of the road and I got ready to turn around again, and I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to get her out of the car. She hadn't seen anything familiar anywhere, not a landmark or a familiar sign or anything.

And then she was sound asleep.

She was right out of it, and with the car stopped to turn, I got my first real chance to have a look at her, curled up against the door with her two hands, palm to palm, tucked in under her cheek. And then I took my right hand and reached across and brushed the side of her face, her cheek, with the back of my hand. And I swear, she nuzzled over, moved towards me and smiled with her eyes still closed, smiled like she liked the feel of it, as if she liked being there, as if she even liked me. Somehow it seemed as though she belonged there in the car—and sure, she was only in her twenties or so, and I'm in my forties, so mathematically she could have been my kid, but you know, it's not impossible, you hear about it happening with other people and everything.

There's a little shift that happens, and it happens all the time, in all kinds of circumstances. Like your eyes suddenly are working a different way, and you size everything up differently. It's like when you make the sale and you sense it: even the air changes, and you know from their expressions
you could practically say, “Our drink is made with only the finest crushed glass,” and you know they'd go ahead and buy it anyway.

That's the way I felt, looking at her. Like it was the difference between someone you've just met and someone you know. Like I could know what she was thinking, and what she wanted, and maybe it was me. A long shot, but maybe it was me.

Don't get me wrong here. I mean, I know all about “no means no” and I would never—but, I mean, she wasn't saying no.

She wasn't saying anything.

I just kept looking over at her when I started driving again, at that little sort of half smile and the way her hair had dried all feathery in around her face. We were just driving back up the road by then, no point to it really, the cabins going by on one side, and I knew that eventually I'd turn around and the cabins would all be going by again on the other side.

Then I just turned the car up one of those narrow little forestry roads, the ones where you push through a tight little throat of spruce trees and then you pop out on a full-sized logging road back along the edge of some clear-cut, green just starting to come up between the wet-black stumps, and I stopped and put the car up into park.

The rain had stopped completely, and we were up pretty high, the front of the car pointing out over towards the river, and mist was jumping up from the bottom of the valley. Jumping up, rising fast, coming out from under the trees in fast, reaching fingers.

It was an older clear-cut, the slash all knocked down by age, the sort of place where, even though it looks like a war zone, enough time has gone by that you know nature's going to take right over again, that it's just been biding its time until it's sure you're gone. Time can heal some pretty big wounds. Fireweed first and raspberries, then the quick deciduous trees like alders and impatient birch.

Lisa didn't wake up when I turned the engine off. I could hear her breathing, I could almost feel the long, deep breaths. Stertorous—that one's as big as
epiphany
, and every bit as precise. She was out of it, out cold, probably unconscious.