HE LEFT THE CITY AS the Wawa 7 fire burned from the Pukaskwa coast to the provincial interior. North of Parry Sound, the flames had reached the Trans-Canada, examined it for several minutes, and then leapt across the tarmac and entered the new forest. By day seven, the vast thunderheads of smoke had reached an altitude of 30,000 feet and altered the flight paths of aircraft. The smoke had been observed in London, England.
He slept uncomfortably and woke uncomfortably. He found himself squeezed next to a young man with a ring in his nose, a bolt in his tongue and several more pieces of hardware protruding from his ears. The face appeared to have been assembled in a hardware store for reasons that weren’t clear; maybe a raised middle finger, he thought.
Paul closed his eyes. The miles rolled outside the bus; the rock, the miles, the moss and the rock, and more miles, and the rock, and then more rock and more miles. He was daydreaming. He fell asleep and when he woke he saw that he was in a rock-filled world with his facially armoured seatmate smiling at him.
“You were snoring,” the youngster said cheerfully.
“Sorry.”
“No problem. Look.” He held up a book. “It’s a book,” and with some daring, added, for emphasis, “A novel, it’s a novel. By Stephen King. He’s really famous.”
“Oh.”
“Really famous.”
“Is he Native?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. He writes super scary shit. Not that I get it.” The youngster dropped his voice into a deeply intimate whisper. “I don’t know how to read. I’m illiterate, right? I can’t read.” He looked at Paul with wild eyes in which the stain of amphetamines was visible. “You keep a book out it makes people think you can read, right?”
“I guess,” said Paul. Who were these kids, he wondered? Long-gone offspring of Kerouac and Kesey, little Benzedrine daddies fleeing across the Shield, armed with books they couldn’t read. The boy could not read and for some reason this provoked a longing in him for his wife, with her books, and her devotion to them. Even his books.
He returned to himself and felt the engine vibrating the steel walls around him. The country flew sideways outside the window.
“What’s in the box?” he said.
“The box?” responded the boy suspiciously.
Between his legs he squeezed a cardboard box tightly, protectively, fidgeting every few seconds with a stained dishtowel tossed over the top.
“The box. What’s in it?”
“Oh.” The youngster glanced uneasily behind them, through the crack between the two seats in front. “I’m not supposed to do this. It’s against the regs. Look at this.” He drew back the dishtowel and to Paul’s amazement an ancient spherical shape rose slowly from the interior, the hairless head of a buried zombie, potted with cracks and markings. It resembled the bald earth itself, and he saw inscribed on its back the thirteen square patterns that mapped the full moons of the year.
“Splendid,” said Paul, “My God.”
Out came the phallic and reptilian head with the yellow stripes and the grey eyes. The creature gave off the mouldy odour of socks and moss, and craned its neck to ascertain that everything falling within range of its prehistoric eyes was as uninteresting as it had been when it last took a peek.
“It’s a turtle.”
“Yes, an eastern red ear. Its blood freezes solid in winter.”
“No shit?”
“None whatsoever.”
“It’s sick.” The boy held back the dishtowel so that Paul could see the creature. He looked closer; the great bearer of the earth was sick. A scum of white fuzz built up in the cracks of its back, like some turtle mange that had come to destroy the world.
“I’m taking him to British Columbia. He’ll get better there.” The boy stroked the shell with a deep and tender affection. “Won’t you buddy? Sure you will.” He looked at Paul again. “He’s going to be all right.”
“Sure he is,” said Paul.
A sick turtle in the company of an illiterate boy with pierced eyebrows, crossing North America by bus. It’d be all right. Just fine. A better time was coming. Paul forced himself to sleep, or at least to close his eyes.
AT BLIND RIVER, HE GOT off the bus and hauled his gear into a Motor Inn where he suffered the inspection of a severe woman who took his money but otherwise remained unconvinced by him. He flopped on the bed and for the first time understood how hot it was, a broiling heat filled the small and painfully neat room, but he felt no inclination to fiddle with a thermostat or even look for one. He took a mickey of Bell’s out of a rucksack and sucked on it. Frequently he heard the helicopters rattling overhead, back and forth, as they took their loads of retardant to drop on the Wawa 7. He wondered if this close sticky heat was caused by the fire, the eruption of fire on earth, a hell that had broken forth while his attention was elsewhere.
He lay on the mattress, scrolling his aimless way through a large television screen positioned at the foot of the bed; commercials for beer, no end of commercials; pickerel fishing on Lake Erie; the familiar footage from Paisley Head, Ontario, a severe reporter in a grey suit counting up the E.coli victims, eleven of them. Death was coming out of the water taps, she explained. He sucked on his mickey, and savoured the life-giving force of the scotch. At the same time, he prepared himself for an attack of dread, a raw sensation of waste and wrong choices, of remorse and infant-like loneliness that he knew was preparing to grab him. Paul smelled it in the room with him.
He had a sudden memory of Linda pulling the bed sheets up to her chin and laughing. For a terrible moment he thought they had stayed together in this very room, with this same grinning television in front of them, watching the drunken world stagger into its own detox, but it had to be somewhere else. He wasn’t sure why it had to be somewhere else, except that he couldn’t bear it if this was the place. It was another town, another bead on the blacktop that stretched outside the door. Spanish, maybe, or Massey, where they walked high up on the banks of the Aux Sables, by the cemetery.
Paul lay and sweated and drank and flipped through the television: … increasingly fanned by winds from the west … the dreary, grey smoke on the screen flicked away, channel after channel of young people grinning and saying foolish things to each other, always grinning. He saw a graphic estimating the number of domestic stock in British Columbia infected with bovine spongiform encephalitis. The number did not mean anything to him. Feeding the minced brains of cows to other cows. Who was the genius that came up with that idea? He watched stricken cattle wobble across the screen.
He looked up idly to the ceiling fan, but the fan was not working. Paul understood that he was drunk. He had achieved a type of lift-off. The phone was in his hand, he was ready to phone her, to have the assurance of his wife’s voice and her calmness speaking to him through the ridiculous wires, but he was ashamed for himself, and he put the machine down.
The rat appeared in the doorway and stopped. It was no ordinary rat, obviously. Paul saw that a dream catcher had been tattooed in red on the animal’s side.
“You are not Rattus norvegicus,” said Paul accusingly.
“No, I’m not, and neither are you. Why don’t you phone your wife,” said the rat. “You have ended up alone in an overpriced motel room watching television and failing to summon up the courage required to phone your wife. You inherited the moral arrogance of your race. You have attempted to chuck the dead world and build a new one. You’ve been mad and drunk all summer and now you’re talking to a rat.”
Paul groaned. It was true. He’d ridden a great road and now he was lying on an unknown bed with a mickey of Bell’s scotch and a talking rat.
“For God’s sake,” he said, convinced momentarily that he had the right to say such words. With a feeling of intense gratitude, he passed out.