“SO YOU’RE A friend of Larry’s, eh?”
I jump at the sound of his voice. It’s the first time he’s spoken in a half hour of bucking and creaking over the gravel road. This is less a road than a cut through the trees, at a steep enough incline that Bob’s tow truck grumbles and whines, without ever making more than maybe twenty kilometres an hour.
“We went to school together,” I say quietly.
“You didn’t call him Bowfinger.”
“Bowmont?”
“Or Professor,” Bob continues, ignoring my correction. I’m guessing he doesn’t approve of the name change.
Another pause. “You must have known him when he was fat.”
I’m not sure what to say to that. “We went to school together.”
Bob gives me a sideways glance from where he’s hunched over the gigantic steering wheel.
“You the one knocked his brains out his ass?”
So far, the new Finn seems pretty unpopular, though I’m pretty sure this particular crime can’t be pinned on me.
“No, sir,” I say. “That wasn’t me.”
Old Bob chews on that for a tense minute or two before he lets me off the hook.
“Too bad. Would have owed you a beer.”
I snicker.
Bob laughs. That same hearty laugh that was echoing around the garage and filling me with warmth.
“Larry was a real asshole before that guy knocked his lights out. He’s still a pain-in-the-ass, but he would have been headed straight for jail before that knock in the head. All the worst bullshit people say about Indians, he was it.”
“Yeah. That’s the Larry I remember. But people change, right?”
People change, Jimmy. You’ve changed. Try to respect that.
“Guess they do when they get a metal goal post right between the eyes. I hear that other kid rode Larry like a bronco, straight into that goddamn thing.”
“That was Devil. My friend, Devil.”
“Your friend’s name is Devil?”
“Your name is Bob Dylan,” I shoot back.
“Yeah, but Bob Dylan’s ain’t. His name’s Zimmerman. I was Bob Dylan before he was Bob Dylan.”
“Devil’s name is Adam.” I laugh. “Anything’s better than Bowmont Livingston, right?”
I’m rewarded with another round of jubilant laughter. I decide that I like Bob Dylan. I like him a lot.
“You always were funny, kid,” he says.
I feel my lungs suddenly stop working, like somebody threw the power switch. “Sorry? What . . .”
“When you were little. You were a funny little kid, before your mom took you away.”
I swallow a lump in the top of my chest. It feels about the size of my fist, but it goes down eventually, drops into the pit of my stomach and sits there like a rock. I take a shallow breath.
“You knew me?”
“I know you,” he says. Nothing more, as if it’s all in those three words. No mystery at all. Just a fact. He drives on in silence for what seems like an hour before he slows the rumbling truck and comes to a stop. He shoves down hard on the emergency brake pedal and gets out of the truck, the clunky metal door making a sound I recognize, but don’t.
He comes around to my side and opens the door.
“Come on down, little Finn,” he says, and something inside me breaks.
I know that voice, those words. It cuts into me, through the centre of me, like a crack in the glass, spreading and ripping a seam through time and space. One more echo from that white room in my dreams, floating out to me through the years. It loosens the dirt, and an army of emotions come wriggling up through my skin, an endless wave of little worms and crawling things, touching their million feet on my every nerve as they climb their way out of me and break onto the surface of my skin. They’re pushing that voice, that memory, in front of them. A lifetime of lost days and false lives pushed aside by their digging. The accumulated dust of a millennium falling away. All that’s left is bedrock, bare and picked clean. Washed by the wind.
I see him standing there, Bob Dylan who is not Bob Dylan. I see him younger, darker, thinner. He reaches a hand out to me, a hand that smells like oil and gasoline. Come on down, little Finn. There is sunlight playing through the trees. Yellow and white, dancing between the boughs of the pines and the firs. I feel so small and so new. Everything is big and wide and full of wonder.
Come on down, little Finn.
I stumble out of the truck, slide down into the mud. There is something trembling inside of me.
“I want to show you something before we get to Bensonhall.”
He leads me down an overgrown dirt road, half a block from the truck, through a path in the high trees, the new sunlight teasing its way through the green canopy above us, lighting up the path in a thousand places.
At the end of the road, there’s a house. My legs give out, and I’m on my knees, crying, full of relief and despair. A swirling vortex of memory and sensory input tears me into a million little pieces. The rich earthy smell of mouldering leaves and green forest, the light blinking through the boughs of a hundred green trees, the shape and colour of that house. That goddamn house.
I’m homesick for a place I only barely remember in the deepest parts of my bones. I don’t know that my eyes have ever seen it before, but something inside of me is weeping for it, as if it’s the only place I have ever belonged.
I’m comforted by the voice of a man I don’t even know.
“You’re all right, kid,” he says, hushing me like a grandfather. Like a father. Bob puts an arm around me, helps me up out of the mud, leading me where I need to go.
The past floats across the water on my eyes. Little Finn, little me, the me from my dreams, comes running through the trees and across the small yard in front of the house. He leaps into a thick black tire, dangling from the arm of the biggest tree skirting the yard. His white-blonde hair long and dancing in the breeze.
“My word, Finn. Be careful!” My mother’s voice. Except it’s not my mother. The woman that steps out into the afternoon light that plays across the porch, she’s so young, so pretty. She looks like my mother, but she can’t be—her face is so happy, so kind . . . The boy looks at her with love in his green eyes. He’s smiling, laughing. So happy, that boy. Me. I was never that happy, that free. Was I? I feel it in his face, in his smile, in his beaming green eyes. I yearn for him to truly be some long forgotten part of me.
A shadow looms behind the boy, tall and dark. It reaches for the boy, strong arms breaking through the darkness and into the sun, pushing gently, but firmly on the tire swing. The man inside the shadow steps forward. His hair is long like Little Finn’s, a thick, sandy blonde beard and moustache cover his face, but not those eyes. Brilliant emerald eyes catching the sun. He laughs, blows a kiss to the woman on the porch. My mother. No. His mother. Little Finn’s mother.
The boy, Little Finn, he’s so happy. So full of joy. When was I ever like that? What is this place?
My body shudders and rejects the dream. Not me. Never me. I’ve grown long and old, full of so much hate, and misery, and self-loathing. The misery, and hopelessness, and hate that my mother, my mother, Jimmy Finn’s mother, fed into me for so many years. It comes festering and bubbling up all through me, until every molecule of my body is soaked in it, steeped and marinated. Lousy with it. Little Finn is gone. Jimmy Finn is broken. And I’m lost somewhere in between.
I feel my feet underneath me again. I’m standing in the now, the here.
Bob Dylan is standing next to me, his sad bulldog face regarding me with something that looks like regret.
“The little boy I knew, he played. He ran. He snuck around all over these woods.” Bob says, “Used to have to come coax you out from under that porch there,” he points at the rickety wooden stairs, overgrown with brush, “Used to bribe you with them sticks of horehound candy you liked. You and Emma.”
“Emma?” The name stirs something else, some twinge of hope. The little lantern is buried, but not quite out. I feel it smouldering in there, deep underneath all of this bullshit I’ve carried with me all these years. I close my eyes and see Little Finn down there, clinging to it, huddled up next to it, tiny and alone, but brave against the dark, blowing into the flame.
Bob smiles, but it’s bittersweet. There’s something behind his eyes.
“I dream about a little girl named Emma.”
“Bet you do,” Bob says. “I bet you do.” No mystery. Just fact.
He walks on ahead of me, leaving his comment behind for me to decode. He kicks pinecones out of his path and shuffles through the long grass until he’s sitting on the dirty steps at the front of the porch that runs the front of the dilapidated cabin. I take a good look at it through today’s eyes, seeing the peeled paint, the bird shit marking the posts, the accumulated dust and dirt piled up along every edge of it. I sneer at the space in my memories where it should have been.
I sit quietly next to Bob and stare out down the road, back to the truck, wondering how long we’re going to waste on ghosts.
“I don’t remember any of this,” I lie. Little Finn is still breathing life into that flame. I feel his father’s arms at my back.
“You remember some,” he grunts at me. “Can’t hide everything, Finn. Sometimes it comes out, whether you want it to or not.” Bob puts his big hand across my back, “And with your people, when it finally finds a way out, it ain’t gonna be pretty.”
“What the fuck does that mean? Your people?”
“Means what it means. You can’t change what’s inside you.”
He picks at the weeds in front of us, silently tugging them out from between the grass until he has a half dozen thick round stems of some kind, not unlike sunflower stems. He pops the ends off and begins to weave them together.
“How’s your mom?” he asks.
An instant twinge of guilt gnaws at my guts and sends a wave of nausea over me.
“Fine. I guess. We don’t talk much.”
“Strong woman, your mother.”
I huff and slide across the stair without even realizing I’ve done it.
Bob’s hands twist and knot at the stems, slowly and purposefully, the same way he talks.
“You don’t think she was strong? All alone out there, being what she is . . . what you are?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. My mother was a selfish bitch.”
“Hmm. Mixed-up maybe. She was trying to protect you.”
“Well, she did a shit job. Dumped me on anybody else first chance she got, so she could go out and pick up random assholes.”
Bob’s fingers keep working. He nods as I speak, as if he’s agreeing with me.
“Probably confused and lonely. Same as you. Needed something she couldn’t get so easy out there.”
“What? A parade of shitty boyfriends, and a kid she couldn’t bother with?”
“You got a lot of sour piss in you.” Bob’s hands keep moving, slow and steady.
I sit silent for a minute, trying to work up something resembling sympathy for the woman that called herself my mother.
I stand and walk, leaving him to whatever the hell he’s making out of his chunks of weeds.
I wander slowly around the house, the rest of it just as worn and neglected as the front, holes in windows, the wood stained and faded, a procession of deserted hornet nests in the eaves above me. I step around the back, into a larger yard, a small field, really, that resonates in my memory, despite the overgrown brush and rotten posts trailing a rusty laundry line.
It flows over top of me, just like in my dreams, but clearer now.
Sheets. White sheets, flowing in the wind. They twist and cascade around me as I walk, hands out to the past, willing myself to touch them, and giddy when I feel them flutter against my fingertips.
Now hearing the voices, high and small, little voices from all around me, laughing, bouncing with the little bodies that they spill from. Little Finn, his pale hair, almost as white as the sheets, running past my legs, followed by the girl, dark braids and freckled face, those olive green eyes. Emma. I drop to my knees and throw my arms around her, around nothing, as she passes through me, running after a memory. They jump and spin and yell, chasing each other through the white walls flapping like wings on the wind. They stop suddenly. They freeze, then turn together to stare wide-eyed, right at me. Through me.
There is a scream from behind me. A hideous, tortured cry of agony, and all of a sudden, the sky is dark and moving. The birds screech as they come, swirling down onto me, onto them, onto the two children. The children are screaming, running for the cover of the house. The birds swarm toward the house, landing in a black mass across the roof, cawing down to the stragglers on the ground. The sheets are torn and mangled, twisted in the dirt beneath them.
The cry comes again, animal and terrible, some creature caught in a trap, screaming for salvation as it gnaws its own limbs off. My mother. No, not my mother. His mother. Finn’s mother. She’s running, a look of panicked terror on her face. She grabs the children by the hands; they are running for the road, away from the woods.
“Run, Finn!” she says. She pleads.
“Run away home, Emma. Run fast and run now.
“Finn. You go with Emma. Right now. And don’t you look back, baby.”
She holds him. She kisses him. Not my mother. His mother.
The two children run. They run fast, and they don’t look back.
Little Finn doesn’t look back. Me. I don’t look back.
The scream turns into a howl.
It’s behind me, fierce and angry.
Some animal, growling with hunger and rage.
It wants my blood on its tongue.
Something stands between us. Someone.
I can hear them, feel them. I know them.
I can’t look back.
There’s hot breath rumbling at my neck.
I don’t dare look back.
Run, Finn.
My mother’s voice.
And don’t you look back, baby.
“YOU OKAY, FINN?”
Yesterday fades, the teeth at my back are gone. All that’s left is confusion. Again.
I’m standing in the front yard, staring down the road. Bob is still sitting on the step, working the weeds in his hands.
“What happened here?” I ask him.
The phantoms of it must still be there on my face. Bob leaves off his weaving. Tossing his project into the tall grass to fade into the earth, he steps across to me.
“A man goes out to hunt, he has to listen to the forest around him,” Bob says, taking a deep breath and raising his hands around him as he continues.
“He has to listen when the birds call, and it echoes off of the mountain. He has to hear the wind when it rustles through the trees at night and tells him if it’s gonna bring rain.”
He takes my hands. He chants something in some language I don’t understand.
He puts a hand flat against my chest, over my heart.
“None of that means a goddamn thing if that man don’t know whose ears he’s listening with.”
And he walks away, back to his tow truck waiting in the road.