Door to cooler to brown milk carton, his vision's a narrow line.
Chugging sweet brown milk here, in front of the cooler, is the opposite of inconspicuous, but it's sweet and thick and just keeps coming. After a litre, something like vision returns. Cheese curds are available by the bag. He begins filling his arms with small yogurts. Speckled bananas await him. Wine, chilled wine, is his for the buying. By the time he makes it to the counter, he can actually hear again, connects tinkling bell to opening door, anticipates sirens or screeching tires, and so reaches now for a fat-bomb butter tart. Collecting bananas and an orange, he's even able to think again, realizes that a baritone voice means a man is speaking near him. No, at him.
“Don't even look at those,” a fit man behind Andrew says in English. Andrew looks back to see a clean-shaven man nodding at the apples and oranges in his hands.
“Tasteless.” He's early forties, well groomed, likes to show some money in his clothes and watch.
This guy really should know that Andrew's smile is not friendliness, just the best he can do to avoid laughter. Kick a kid in the face then chat about snacks. Kick. Chat.
“When I toured, I dreamt of fruit,” this stranger continues, “would have given a few toes for berries. I've actually got some melon in the truck if you're interested. Name's Glen.”
Andrew doesn't reply, simply pays for his carbs, aminos and trace fattys then follows Glen outside.
“You doing many centuries?” Glen asks, wondering how often Andrew bikes a hundred miles a day. “It's just over there. The Pathfinder.”
One foot, then the other.
“Honeydew melon. Some mango too. Cut up and ready.” Glen leads him to his truck and opens the passenger door. “Let me move the seat back. Here, take as much as you want. Go ahead. God, my mouth used to just bark for the stuff. Haven't been out in years, though. Marriage, mortgage, management. Notice 3M's a glue company? Pass me a few grapes. Boy, you look bagged. What about a morning off? We'll throw the bike in the back. C'mon, stretch out.”
“Sure.”
“I'll get your bike. You just eat.”
He does.
One August night six weeks before Andrew and Betty's ferry date, Mark phoned to invite Andrew out for a night ride.
“I still don't have lights,” Andrew replied.
“Not required. We go urban.”
Andrew glanced past an eavesdropping Stan at the kitchen clock and asked Mark, “Where do I meet you?”
Stan and Andrew had stood exactly like this around the hallway phone hundreds of times over the years. By the time he was three years old, Andy could reach the phone faster than his dad. After the divorce, they'd wordlessly developed a little theatrical routine of overheard dialogue and unseen mime. What adult callers thought was extraordinary politeness on Andy's part was actually family code. When Stan's friends would call they'd think that Andy was coping with the divorce well and really maturing as he'd reply “Hello, Paul,” or “Good evening, Shiela,” when in fact he was asking Stan whether he wanted to take a call. With his prepubescent voice, he could get away with slightly corny lines like, “You're right, Mr. Dunbar, my dad might be interested in life insurance.” Andy's purposefully overheard lines would give Stan time to haul himself within sight of the hallway phone to shake his head yes or no. If the phone was for him, Andy reflexively turned away from Stan and the living room. Neither of them acknowledged that this made it easier to take the rare calls from his mom. Before cordless phones of the late 1980s and cellphones of the late 1990s, divorce and infidelity were marked by phone cords stretched around door frames, those borders within borders.
This decade-old ritual of Stan looking on with a raised eyebrow as Andrew talked on the phone continued when Mark called to propose a night ride. Hanging up, Andrew partially asked Stan and mostly told him, “You're all right for an hour and a half” while bounding upstairs to change.
“Nice black tights,” Stan said as Andrew trotted back down. “Seriously, shouldn't you wear something brighter?”
“I'll be fine.” Andrew pulled on a long-sleeved jersey.
“I just heard you say you don't have lights. Andrew, this doesn't sound safe.”
“I'm going with Mark. He's an excellent rider. It'll be like the buddy system.” Andrew began filling up his water bag. “Do you want to do the tube now or wait?”
“What I want is for you to come home in one piece.”
“Both of us want that. Relax. The paper's on the table.” Andrew avoided Stan's alternately stern and beseeching look by stepping into the living room and fixing the TV remote to the strip of Velcro on Stan's chair. “Remote's up. I'll be back before midnight. Okay?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“I'll be safe, Dad. I always am.” Andrew shut the door behind him.
Andrew can't stop squirming around in the Pathfinder's wide seat. Even in the few minutes before he remembers
seat controls
, he shifts left, right, fore and aft, amazed at this county of ass space. Out the window, every metre of blurring land brands him a traitor. One hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. An hour in a car, a long day on the bike.
“Here,” Glen offers, all but abandoning the steering wheel to lean across Andrew with his right hand to grope at the far side of his seat. “Lumbar support.” The leather seat actually inflates at the base of Andrew's spine, pushing his hard stomach a little closer to Glen's lingering arm.
“Is one of us actually going to drive?” Andrew asks.
“Thought you could use some comfort.”
“
Alive
is very comfy.”
Glen returns at least one hand to the wheel. “Oh, honeydew melon,” he says a few minutes later, motioning to another container in the back. “With lemon juice. Somehow the lemon makes the melon taste more like itself.”
Two, three bites into the bright green melon Andrew replies, “There must be a name for that, a thing that makes another thing more itself.”
“Yeah, alcohol.”
That Glen happens to have not one but two bottles of chilled white wine behind the seat is notable enough. Then there's the conspicuously new mini-cooler in which they're chilling. However keen he is for the wine, however delighted at the cool touch of the bottle's slender neck, Andrew finally admits what's happening here. The fruit Glen feeds him has been taken out of a dozen plastic shopping bags which have been relocated around his bike. Whatever domestic situation has this moneyed family guy piloting his Stupid User Vehicle in the early morning has him doing so with a load of family groceries.
The groceries have probably been in the car overnight, but the chilled wine and the cooler in which they sit have been purchased this morning in this
belle province
of gas station wine. Within a second of grabbing the bottle, Andrew knows it's a screw-top, not corked, but he digs the knife out of his pocket anyway.
“Oh, screw-top. How convenient,” he says, briskly tapping his unopened knife on the neck of the bottle. He waits until he's had a deep swallow before asking, “So, you saw me when?” He pauses just a second, smiles just a little, before leaning over, dropping a hand onto Glen's substantial thigh and raising the bottle to his mouth. “I've got it. I've got it. You just drink.”
“Mmm. Maybe half an hour ago. I thought someone with a thousand-dollar bike between his legs and five dollars' worth of clothes on his back might have a story to tell.” Glen motions for Andrew to raise the bottle to his lips again.
“Storytime's over.” Andrew drinks again, guzzling wine that tastes like green apples spritzed with honey. “What if you didn't find me on the way back â take the cooler home for family picnics?”
“I don't think my family's what interests you.”
Glen smiles, and so, sure, does Andrew. Kilometres whiz past every minute they drive, chat and drink.
Andrew had been evasive and dismissive of Stan's questions about his night ride with Mark but was then a little annoyed when Mark rode up as taciturn as usual. On the phone Mark had been inviting, almost imploring. Collecting Andrew at the house, all he had to say was, “Let me know when you've warmed up.” On residential then downtown streets, Mark took corners and assumed Andrew would follow. They didn't say a word until their approach spilled them toward a towering parking garage. Andrew kept even the question “This it?” from leaving his mouth, listening instead for Mark's confirming downshift. As they slipped around the dropped yellow entrance barricades, Mark finally broke the vow of mileage to offer gearing advice (“Middle-middle”) before they commenced a race up each level of the parking garage.
“You can start on the inside,” was all Mark said.
And then they were off, racing up the parking garage's constant incline, struggling from one corner to the next. Beside them, the still, dumb cars shone under caged fluorescent lights.
Despite the bleaching light and the layered reek of dirty concrete, exhaust and leaked engine oil, there were pleasures in this parkade's spiral of right angles. Unlike any climb in the surrounding woods, the stained concrete incline was invariably even. By the second storey, will, lung and leg were as much freed as burnt by the steady slope. Pain was the third racer that night. There was also the electric novelty of riding at night, the long leash of light. The banks of caged fluorescents lined the ceiling as regularly as the strips of yellow paint carved up the concrete. Andrew had investigated but still not purchased cycling lamp systems capable of lighting his way through dense forest for hours. The parkade race was as novel as night baseball or skiing at nine p.m.
Here, finally, was width enough for a proper race. Week after week on the single track, Andrew had raced Mark's pace, but from behind.
Now each lane was at least as wide as a road, and he rode faster with Mark beside him, not in front of him.
The wide concrete lanes also afforded them the track racer's lateral cat and mouse game. Block left defensively or pour it all ahead in a fleeing sprint? To not be cutting a line was to be cut by one. A moving obstacle came from above in the shape of an exiting sedan. Mark didn't hide his excited grin as their change of play approached, whereas the driver's face swung visibly between paralyzing confusion (movement without a car?) to projected rage (Because of you I might actually have to steer). The riders split to either side of the car like wind around a sail and were sucked together at its red close. In their parting, Mark must have released his pump because suddenly Andrew's ribs took a token whack from the pump's light rod as it played his triangle of ribs, arms and top tube. Andrew retaliated by drawing as large a mouthful of water as his burning lungs would permit, then spitting it in a thin jet onto Mark's blue side. He laughed and choked and gulped while gunning for the next turn.
Parked cars calibrated the burning race, those bright turtle shells, those smirking gas boxes. The occasional tinted window flashed briefly with their greasy, deltoid reflections, chests bent into the climb.
Finally the choked, muzzy air began to loosen, and the envelope of their echoed tires spilled open. Had this climbing spiral ended in a cliff, Andrew would have gone over it as well. Oh, the steady push. Everything for the end. Here, finally, was the complete meeting point of strength and weakness. By surrendering everything to the pain, he could claim the pain for fuel. He painted each toenail with pain. Pain was speed; it was worship. Mark wasn't ahead of him.
The cooler, fresher air of the parkade's rooftop pulled them into an open-air decline. City lights pushed up against an overhang of stars. On the road below, a strip of red tail lights passed into the half-dark city. They didn't stop until they reached the exterior wall of the parkade, a metre-high battlement for this castle of cars.
Four cleats clicked out. Helmets were dangled from abandoned bar ends. Water was gulped and spat. Finally, Andrew leaned his back over the low wall to stretch his head out over the noise and light of the traffic below. “We gotta get more guys.” A crown of sweat slipped back from his hairline. He rolled his skull back and forth, taking air
so easily now. That tight little sound was a small zipper, but he didn't look up. Then he heard the rasp of a match being lit. Ah, sure, the fug of weed. When Andrew began to lean forward for the joint he felt Mark's hand in the middle of his chest.
“No, hang back,” said Mark. “Take it like that.” Mark kept the hot joint in his fingers and raised it to Andrew's lips, suspended where they were out over the traffic.
In the Pathfinder, the wine bottle Andrew feeds Glen passes back and forth in front of the car stereo.
“No CDs?” Andrew asks.
“A few here and there. Mostly I just troll the radio.”
“Mind if I give her a spin?” Andrew doesn't wait for an answer.
In rough terms, a radio's seek and scan are all the GPS one needs in Canada. A sludge of US commercials marks a southern dip along the border.
Do you suffer from vague paranoia and/or inexplicable hostility and/or emotional distance? If so, Centrax may be for you.
Not just French but the abundance of talk, the actual human discussion of issues and events, heralds your entrance into Quebec. The Anglo bridge posts east and west of Quebec differ radically by density. If the radio's seek stumbles every few seconds, you're in Ontario. Here in rural Quebec, the receiver numbers climb and roll by the dozens, up and down the entire band, with just a few snags. The inevitable country music sanding down its planks of you, me and regret over and over again. Always surprising is the metal. In rural areas with population bases that make hospitals difficult, who's bankrolling the thrash? Second most objectionable is the so-called contemporary rock, that emotional marketing of women pimped up and down the entire industry or male voices so thick with counterfeit feeling that you can hear their whiskers and see their squints. There is, of course, the reliable CBC, the radio birthright. Equally popular (but unsubsidized) is also classic rock. The state has laid one radio rail across the country, and the baby boomers have laid the other. From sea to shining sea, somebody's angel is still the centrefold.