Zack (10 page)

“Where’s your ID?” he said.

“My wallet’s in my back pocket.”

“Turn around.”

The cop jerked my wallet from my jeans and ordered me to face front. He checked my driver’s licence and student card.

“Nothing here, Duane,” the second cop called from the cab.

“Look in the back.”

My wallet was stuffed back into my pocket. The big cop grabbed me under the arm, lifting me enough to keep me off balance, and hauled me to the cruiser. Its engine was running but the lights were off. The rear door squeaked as the cop pulled it open and shoved me head first into the car, so hard I sprawled across the edge of the seat then fell onto the floor, my face burning when it rubbed against the carpeting, my shoulders pinched back as I was squeezed into the narrow space between the front and back seats. The door struck my feet when he closed it. A front door opened and the car sagged when the cop got in.

A nauseating stench of puke, sweat and old shoes filled my nostrils. I breathed through my mouth, fighting down the heaves. A ball of fiery pain burned between my shoulders and I strove to hold off claustrophobic panic as I lay face down, wrists manacled behind me.

The cop was talking into the radio mike. Computer keys clicked. A few moments later he got out, opened the back door and helped me out of the car.

“Didn’t you see the sign?” he asked, the tough edge gone from his voice. “It’s illegal to camp here.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t mean to sleep so long.”

I was tempted to point out that the truck down the
parking lot had been there longer than I had, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Nothing in his truck, Duane,” the second cop said. He was a clone of the first cop, except his jacket was zipped up and he had a pencil moustache.

“Listen, fella,” Duane said. “Aside from the bylaw, it’s not a good idea to camp out in a place like this. There’s a lotta mean types riding the Interstate. You wanna catch some sleep, go to a campground.”

“We gonna write him up?” Moustache said, turning off his flashlight.

“Where you headed?” Duane asked me.

“Mississippi. I’m going to visit my grandfather.”

“Turn around.”

With a jingle the cuffs fell away.

“We’re gonna let you go with a warning. But watch yourself. Don’t do anything foolish like this again.”

“Yessir,” I said.

The two cops walked slowly to the cruiser and got in. Duane spoke into his mike as Moustache drove away.

I got into the Toyota and pushed the key into the ignition. The contents of the glove compartment were strewn across the seat and littered the floor. I felt liquid trickle down one side of my nose and into my mouth. I tasted blood. When I reached to the floor for the box of tissues I noticed the scrapes on my wrists where the manacles had dug in.

I started the truck and steered onto the Interstate, a pain stabbing my shoulders each time I changed gears. As I drove, I dabbed the cut on my aching head with the bloody tissue.

By dawn, Columbus was behind me and I was headed towards Cincinnati on I-71. My hands still shook if I took them off the wheel.

A
little while after I crossed the Kentucky border I saw a familiar name: General Butler State Park. He couldn’t have been the Butler from Pawpine’s days in the Revolutionary War, but I took the off ramp anyway and followed the two-lane blacktop through the hills. I figured I’d find a campsite, put the truck back in order—the cop who searched it had low respect for other people’s property—and take it easy for the rest of the day. Getting handcuffed and thrown around and generally treated like a crook had tired me out.

The sun was high in the sky when I located the campsite assigned to me by the ranger. It was in a row of sites along a creek that, according to my map, trickled through the hardwoods into the Kentucky River. The campground wasn’t full—the sites on both sides of me were unoccupied—but it wasn’t like being out in the wilderness either. Dogs barked, kids flashed past on mountain bikes, car engines growled to life, savoury blue smoke from barbecues drifted on the hot air.

I sat on the picnic table munching a three-decker sandwich and sipping tonic water from the can,
watching a pair of ducks tip their tail feathers towards the clear blue sky as they fed and chuckled in the shallows. A light breeze murmured in the evergreens that flanked my campsite. But I couldn’t relax.

I didn’t really feel like reliving the experience at the welcome station but I knew I had to. Mom had always told me never to hold down feelings or pretend they weren’t there. “If you do,” she’d say, “those emotions will stew and bubble like a volcano and sooner or later they’ll erupt, usually when you don’t expect it. Yeah,” she added, mixing her metaphor, “like thugs crashing a party.”

Well, a thug was what I felt like. What had that whole SWAT team episode been all about, anyway? A kid trapped in the back of a pickup truck wasn’t exactly a terrorist threat. The cop who had cuffed me and thrown me into the cruiser had either taken too many steroids or watched too much TV. And his partner. Thrashing around in my truck, pulling my belongings apart, poring over everything I owned, leaving a chaotic mess behind him.

I fingered the wound on my forehead; it was still sticky and it stung when I touched it. I drank down the last of my tonic water and flung the can at the garbage drum chained to a hardwood tree, then pounded the top of the picnic table, seething in frustration. Manacled and disoriented, I had felt completely helpless against the authority and menace of the two cops. It was hard to explain: they had treated
me like scum, and for that reason I felt worthless, a nothing, and when the cop had hauled me out of the cruiser and unlocked the cuffs I had felt
grateful
. Now I was disgusted with myself for letting them get to me that way.

I hopped off the table, picked up the pop tin and dropped it into the drum. I climbed into the truck and changed into my running gear. After I locked up, I loped off down the gravel road and jogged around the park to warm up before I came to the hill by the main gate. Leaning into the ascent, I sprinted to the crest, turned and jogged back down, dashed to the top again, repeated the cycle endlessly, grinding up the steep grade again and again until sweat streamed from every pore, my chest rose and collapsed like a bellows, my pulse hammered in my ears, my thigh muscles burned and quivered. I pounded up that hill until I crumpled exhausted to the grass by the side of the road.

The hangover from my running fell on me like a bag of sand, sending me into a dreamless sleep. I woke slapping mosquitoes and perspiring: the inside of the truck was like a stove. I crawled out into the morning swelter, grabbed my gear and headed along the road to the showers. I might as well have saved my energy. By the time I got back to the campsite every inch of my frame was bathed in sweat.

After a gourmet breakfast of peanut butter and
crackers washed down with warm apple juice, I decamped. Above me a grey slab of sky threatened rain. I hit Louisville just in time to get snarled in rush-hour traffic on the bypass that looped around the city to connect with I-65. Blasted by humid air rushing in the windows, I drove south, set my watch back an hour at Upton. The highway seemed to sway between the hills like a pendulum. Kentucky blended into Tennessee, and not long after, I made Nashville. No fan of country music and its variations, I kept the radio silent, and as if in revenge the tangle of intersecting highways and bypasses around the city led me the wrong way. Instead of slipping past the music capital I found myself in it, and then the rain began.

Exasperated and short-tempered, I pulled into a mini-mall, bought a vacuum flask and got it filled with coffee at a take-out chicken joint. In an accent as thick as molasses the waiter gave me directions, drawing a crude map on a napkin while he drawled away, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Talking to him, I knew I was finally in the South, and my trip to see my grandfather, for so long an abstract plan, began to feel real.

Fifteen minutes later I was speeding south on Highway 100, looking for a place called Pasquo. By the time I found the little town the rain was heavy and thick and I almost missed the sign indicating the northern terminus of the Natchez Trace Parkway. I parked in the lot, went inside the welcome centre and
left a few moments later with a collection of booklets and a map, which I looked over in the truck, sipping hot strong coffee.

“You’re goin’ to Natchez, you oughta take the Trace,” the waiter had suggested, completely confusing me until he explained that the Trace was a five-hundred-mile-long two-lane road. Looking at the map, I could see his advice was good. I was sick to death of the homogenized boredom of the interstates. The Parkway began just outside Nashville and twisted and bent its way south through Tennessee, taking a twenty-five-mile bite out of Alabama before crossing into Mississippi.

Reading the pamphlets while the rain drummed on the roof and coursed down the fogged windshield, I felt like a time-traveller. For centuries before Columbus landed in the so-called New World (to the millions of people already living here it was the same old place), the Trace had been a major trail used by Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians. Later, Hernando de Soto—whoever he was, I thought, imagining a frown of displeasure on The Book’s chubby face—had followed it. So had the explorer Meriwether Lewis and the Indian-killer and someday president Andrew Jackson. The Trace became a post road after 1800. Most of the travellers, settlers and merchants who floated their wares on timber barges down the Mississippi River to Natchez, sold the boats because they couldn’t be poled back upriver against the
current. Then they hiked back north on the Trace.

In a strange sort of way I thought the ancient trail was part of my history, too. “None of you came from nowhere,” The Book had told us in our first class the previous February, smiling at our confusion. “That’s a
correct
use of a double negative. All of you came from somewhere. You have a history. This subject isn’t an abstract list of dates and wars and constitutions. It’s real. As real as you are.”

I read that the Trace would take me past farms and fields where slaves had bent sweating over rows of vegetables and cotton with crude hoes in their callused hands. Yeah, I thought, men and women like Pawpine whose parents and grandparents had been torn from their lives and homes in Africa, shipped across the sea, given strange names and put to work building a country they weren’t allowed to share in.

I turned the window defroster on high, spread the map open beside me on the seat and started the truck. When the windshield cleared I turned south again.

I didn’t get far. The road, a well-maintained two-lane with wide grassy shoulders, wove its way through gently rolling woods that opened up occasionally into farm land. The rain beat down with a vengeance and thunder growled in the distance. I passed Garrison Creek, pushed on until I got to a picnic area with a sign that said Old Trace and finally gave in, pulling off the road. The windshield wipers flapped in vain against the sheets of water pouring
down. At the far edge of the little parking lot a bush road led to a hiking trail. Remembering the cops in Ohio, I steered the truck into the bush until it was out of sight.

The few steps from the cab to the back door were enough for the roaring rain to drench me to the skin. Inside, I pulled off my wet clothes and tossed them into a corner. I clicked on my flashlight and lay down on the sleeping bag, head propped up on my clothes pack, and read a mystery novel, slapping mosquitoes that hummed in the humid air before taking turns at the feast.

Some time during the night I woke to the roar of wind, the drumming of rain and the hollow slamming of branches striking the top and sides of the truck. With the violence of a ship striking a reef, a thunderclap burst overhead. I sat up quickly, banging my head on the rear wall of the cab as I scrambled to my knees. I peered out the back window just as a flash of lightning crackled for at least two seconds, illuminating the parking lot and the meadow with a ghostly blue light. A deafening crack of thunder followed immediately. The storm was right above me, flinging sheets of rain against the truck. The wind came in furious waves. Another blinding bolt of lightning leapt from the dark sea of sky, driving me from the window just as thunder slammed the air and the floor shuddered under me. A second later, something
exploded behind me and crashed down, rocking the truck on its springs like a toy boat.

I dove under my sleeping bag and rolled into a ball, wishing the storm would go away. Two more flashes lit up the sky, so bright the light pierced my bedding; two more eruptions of sound pounded above me before I realized the tumult was receding. As slow as a tide, the wind lessened in power and the deluge became rain again.

I’d like to say that I jumped out of the truck eager to do battle with the forces of nature and anxious to survey the damage, but I stayed inside, shaking and wide-eyed until dawn. I dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and climbed out of the truck onto the spongy leaf-covered track. Grey light and birdsong filled the bush around me and gold sunlight tinged the treetops along the edge of the meadow. It was already hot, the air sodden with moisture.

Pushing fallen branches aside, I made my way to the front of the truck. A monstrous dead oak had crashed down in the storm, crushing dozens of smaller trees as it fell, and its topmost branches had grazed the Toyota’s hood and fender. The hood was creased across the middle, the fender was crumpled and one headlight smashed.

“Man-oh-man,” I muttered. The massive trunk of the oak, half a metre in diameter, had broken off about two metres above the ground. Had I parked a few metres farther into the bush the tree would have
struck the truck’s cap, crushing both it and me into the muddy ground.

“Welcome to Mississippi, Zack,” I said out loud.

I
wished I could have lit a bonfire to cheer myself up, but even an experienced woodsman would have been challenged to coax a flame from the drenched wood scattered around me. I sat down on the rear bumper of the truck. There had been times in my life—like the time I had given in to the nagging of a girl I had been going out with in grade nine and tried marijuana—when I had shaken my head in disgust and asked myself, Zack, what the hell are you doing? This was one of those times.