“Should we?” Piotr touches the brakes and the car slows down. The man rises in anticipation.
“No. It’s him, the guy we saw on the ferry.”
“That’s not the same person,” he says, but jabs at the accelerator and they shoot away. He watches in the rear-view mirror. “The other man was much smaller.”
“It was him,” Amy says. He knows well enough not to argue against her memory.
They drive in silence for the next several minutes and Amy remembers the last time they picked up a hitchhiker. They had been
on another island. The Sanibel Island in Florida and heading up towards a reef of smaller islands. The man had appeared so suddenly, emerging from a dark screen of mangrove, that they stopped more for fear of hitting him. They couldn’t have known that the round, soft-faced middle-aged man was mentally handicapped. Once they did realize, they had travelled too far to take him back. His shirt was neatly ironed, his cotton pants had a sharp crease, and his shoes shone. He has a mother, Amy remembers thinking, reminded of Harry in the town of Carona and his tiny, caring mother. As she travels across Manitoulin Island sitting beside Piotr in the car while outside a saw-toothed, pine-tree landscape divides land from sky, she thinks of a pink and turquoise horizon, of the round man they picked up in Florida, and wonders how long it took his mother to track him down.
BEWARE OF CROCODILES CROSSING
, the road signs had said. She imagines that he might still be out there, heading across those shell-strewn beaches, on and on he goes, right into the Gulf of Mexico. Then she sees herself cradling a huge conch shell against her chest. Piotr stands so close to her that his wet bathing suit touches the side of her leg. They are waiting for the orange ball of sun to drop into the ocean. They long to see the phenomenon of the green flash occurring just as the sun sets.
“We should go back to Florida, it was so beautiful there,” she says. He doesn’t answer.
Yes, it was beautiful, but it was rotten too. After they spent the entire day shelling they sat out in someone’s backyard looking out over the Gulf. It was dark and lanterns bobbed on skiffs, nodding across the violet water. From a patio behind her, there was music, a jumpy Ry Cooder song, “Get Rhythm,” and voices; the voices of people reclining beneath pastel umbrellas, the soft murmur threading through the music. She and Piotr sat side by side on the beach that night but rather far apart for a couple in love, she sifting white sand through her fingers and Piotr wondering aloud for the third or fourth
time what it was that these people did that allowed them the waterfront property, the cars, the boats. She didn’t sense the growing frustration that lay behind his question, his disappointment over what he perceived to be a lack of opportunity for himself the small gains he had made. She didn’t think of the Russian proverb he often quoted: “Not married by thirty, not rich by forty, always an idiot.” Rather she thought that he wanted to be far away from her, out on one of those lamp-lit boats, scuba-diving or snorkelling and not beside her, a comparatively mature woman who must constantly diet and exercise and suck in her stomach and try to ignore the quizzical glances they received from strangers on the beach, in restaurants. The odd couple
.
When they did go snorkelling she encountered a manta ray that had lain hidden in the sand. It rose up in front of her suddenly and she’d darted to the surface, terrified. Piotr left her side to pursue it and, abandoned, she felt claustrophobic in the underwater world and swam back to the boat alone. She watched the yellow tip of his snorkel move further and further away. That was when Piotr began to leave her, but she chose not to notice
.
They enter the store in Little Current and Amy enjoys all at once the smell of deer hide and the dry, pleasant odour of sweetgrass. She follows the scent to a display rack and takes down a braid of grass. She will buy it and hang it in the car. Good luck and all that; a blessing of some kind. She searches for a clerk. A radio plays in a room behind the counter but there’s no sign of anyone. They wander for several moments among the shelves of moccasins and hand-knit bulky sweaters, both of them feeling as though they’re being watched. Piotr grows impatient. He fills his cheeks with air and expels it slowly. “Come on,” he urges the invisible clerk. Moments later a woman appears from the room behind the counter. She’s heavy-set, a plump native woman with clear, silky-looking skin. Amy sets the sweetgrass down onto the counter. “You people just off the ferry?” the woman asks.
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you the lucky ones,” she says with a slight smile. “The ferry’s going to be shut down for a while now.”
“What’s up?”
The woman explains that she’s just heard it on the radio, a barricade has gone across the highway just south of Tobermory, blocking off traffic. A slender teenage boy enters the store. He wears his baseball cap low on his forehead and leans into the counter, studying them.
“I guess we are lucky,” Amy says as they get into the car, but she doesn’t feel lucky. She thinks of the extra days they might have had together if they had encountered the barricade and not been able to board the ferry. They would have had to backtrack, take a land route up around Georgian Bay. For the past two summers there have been similar occurrences of short-term blockades by native people in all three of the Prairie provinces. The incidents that have sparked them are sometimes sketchy and forgotten almost as quickly as the barricades come down. Piotr turns on the radio, still concerned about the possibility of heavy smoke from forest fires reducing visibility and causing the highway to be closed. The news report says the fires burning north of Thunder Bay are still under control. They learn, too, of other blockades by the Ojibway Indians at the Saugeen and Cape Croker reserves.
The sun has begun to drop low on the horizon as they drive through Espanola.
YOU ARE ENTERING INDIAN COUNTRY
, a yellow spray-painted message on a train trestle bridge announces. “Where isn’t it Indian country?” Piotr comments, and, as if to confirm the message, two dark-skinned children appear beside the highway, carrying fishing rods. There are probably six more where those two came from, Amy thinks, and sure enough three more dark-haired children rise up from reeds beside the road. “Watch.” But Piotr has already touched the brakes. Beyond the children a woman stands in
front of a sagging, unpainted house, an axe in hand. The children turn and look at her; she has obviously shouted a warning. Then she returns to her task of chopping kindling. Amy imagines a warm setting, fried potatoes browning in a pan on the stove inside the house, fingers dunking pickerel fillets into a bowl of flour.
While Piotr is forever raising the binoculars in search of distant shores, Amy sees bits and pieces of the whole. It doesn’t occur to her, for instance, that there is dioxin in the fish the children aspire to catch. As the car passes by the house she turns and notices the satellite dish set up on a rock behind it. “You okay?” she asks Piotr. She noticed that his skin has become slick with perspiration as his body works to slough off the poison of the Scotch he drank last night.
“Amy, I am okay.” He’s peeved because it’s the second time she’s asked him this in the last half hour. She supposes that he objects to her asking because it draws attention to the fact that even though she had drunk more Scotch than he had, been awake the entire night while he had slept soundly, she has driven the larger portion of the distance so far. That even though she is nine years older, she seems to have much more stamina. But she discovers her error as he begins to tell her he’s worrying about how to adapt the stage play
The Emigrant
for film. He has already discussed the problems at length with the woman he will meet in Belgium; how he will take the two men in the play out of the basement room where the entire action is supposed to occur without sacrificing the tone of the play or the sense of the immigrants’ isolation in a foreign society. If he takes them from their basement room and puts them out on the street, he will lose, he worries, the important factor of their self-imposed imprisonment in a new country, how they choose to cling in desperation to old ideas, ideals, philosophical stances. As Amy listens to his monologue, she hears this Elizabeth person speaking through him and bitterness rises in her throat. She, Amy, is his
translator. It’s up to her to pick apart the tricky analogies he draws in awkward and convoluted sentences. Only she can paraphrase them and repeat them back to him or write them down. The reward, his relief and astonishment that she appears to have read his mind, belongs to her alone.
“Well, what do you think?” he asks as he finishes describing how he will go about dramatizing what is already dramatic.
Corny, melodramatic, hyperbole, Amy thinks. If she said this his face would darken and twist with anguish and he would lash out at her, say that she doesn’t understand the nature of real drama. Later, after he had looked up her words in a dictionary, he would circle her with cautious, tentative questions. An endless screen of dark trees flies past the window, a seemingly impenetrable wall. But suddenly there’s an opening, a logging path cutting through that wall. “Stop the car,” Amy says.
The car idles beside the highway. A man’s voice on the radio predicts rainfall during the night. “I see that you are angry,” Piotr says.
Amy picks up the binoculars from the dash and raises them. A speck on the highway leaps forward, a truck, slightly distorted by the lenses. “I’m not angry.”
“Tell me what you’re thinking, then.”
My chest will explode, Amy thinks. She has come to imagine that in breathing one another’s breath across the pillow cells have fused and they have given birth to a third entity, which is both of them, yet exists apart from them, and whose singular and omnipresent shadow somehow confirms their own existence. She knows that if he leaves, this third person will be murdered. She shoves the binoculars back onto the dash with more force than is necessary. He calls after her as she leaps from the car and jogs down the gravel shoulder. She cuts down through a spongy ditch and up the other side of it and enters the logging path. Hard, mean, confining, she thinks, and musty,
like the inside of her head right now. Mean country. A relentless gloominess. She squints up at the corridor of sky at the top of the path and watches as a hawk wheels, riding the air’s currents, its keen eye noting minute movement, discerning what is prey, what is not. There’s a sudden scrambling sound in the underbrush off to one side and she stops dead, the hair on the back of her neck prickling. A bear. She fears the lumbering but swift and deadly violence of a bear, but then she sees the sweep of antlers as a deer rises up among the trees.
Piotr steps up close behind her, watching as the deer ambles off into the dense forest. “Oh, nice.” She feels the push of his words against her cheek. His arms circle her waist.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
She leans against him for a moment. “What I am thinking.”
“Yes.”
Amy turns into him and they stand face to face, noses touching. “What I am thinking,” she says, “is that I’d better take off about ten pounds if I’m going to find another lover.”
She’s gratified by the mixture of fear and grief in his eyes. “Oh, I see.” He releases her. “You are being perverse.” As he turns away she sees that pebbly pink mole sticking up through the bristles of his fresh haircut. You have a thick neck, she thinks. Believe it or not, your head is perfectly square. I don’t know how your mother ever managed to give birth to you. You are ridiculously pigeon-toed. You have the legs of a woman. The reason I love your penis is because it looks so funny when it’s stiff, the way it sways and dips, the flagpole of your body so large yet friendly-looking and eager to the point of being almost obsequious and not at all as menacing as you may hope. Shut up, shut up, she tells herself. I love you. She steps forward and holds him and presses her face into the back of his head. “Everyone always leaves me.” She tastes the saltiness of his
perspiration. This isn’t entirely true, she knows it. She was the one who left Hank and their child, Richard.
“You knew it would come to this. I never said anything different. This has always been the understanding.”
Because you have your goal, Amy thinks, which probably includes a younger woman with wide enough hips to allow for the passage of another square-headed person just like you.
“Amy, please, don’t cry, you’ll just make it more difficult.” But it’s he who is crying. She feels it in the trembling of his stomach muscles and in his words.
“I can’t help it.”
He turns to face her again and they stand joined from knee to face, crying. Amy is feeling rather than actually thinking about Timothy becoming withdrawn after Jill died, turning into a collector and hoarder of the past. How the family, after the initial surge of sympathy it received over Jill’s death, became the source of ridicule and gossip as a result of the junk Timothy began carting home in the trunk of his car. They were small things at first, licence plates, bits of pottery, and then almost anything he could fit into the trunk – hub caps, wagon wheels, washstands, scrap metal. And then he began to tow home whole vehicles. In the same way Margaret’s new ecstasy spilled into the town of Carona – as she seized every opportunity to proselytize in the street or in the hardware store, telling people the good news, that Jill’s death had been for Margaret’s salvation, and theirs too, if only they had hearts willing to listen – Timothy’s junk filled the basement, the garage, and spilled out into the yard.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Piotr says as they walk hand in hand back towards the car.
While last night in the hotel room in Toronto he was quietly determined and concise, speaking as though he had memorized what he wanted to say, his steely but quiet resolution to leave her is
now giving way to sadness – doubt? She squeezes his hand and he returns the squeeze and she feels hope rising.
They wheel in off the highway outside of Thessalon and pull up at the office of the Maranatha Motel and to the sight of adolescent children, exuberant and daring as they skateboard up and down a set of shallow steps in front of the service building. Parents push toddlers on swings in the playground while a black Lab dodges in and out among their legs and then lopes off to fetch a stick someone has thrown into the lake.