LISTEN, I’ve never minded driving, and I’ve never minded company, either. I mean, if I don’t have anyone riding with me, I’ll even talk to myself, that’s how much I like to have someone to talk to. Once, I was on that big wide toll road across Nova Scotia, heading for Prince Edward Island—that one that lets you miss the dangerous stuff at Folly Lake. I mean, there aren’t any crossroads coming in, just trees as far as you can see, and most of them are tree-farmed black spruce, stretching out away from you in the straight lines they were all planted in—and I found myself answering my own questions, except I was answering them in a fake Scottish accent.
A guy in a big Crown Vic rolled by me, one wheel on the yellow and then the other way out next to the gravel on the other side, swinging back and forth like he’s about to lose it all and roll into the ditch. Ten o’clock in the morning and he might have been loaded, for all I know. You see it all, you drive long enough.
And I said out loud, “Big car like that, and he has to be all over the road with it. He’s not a very good driver, is he?”
“Nae, he isn’t, laddie,” I answered. “Don’t ken how to merge or nowt.”
All right, it sounds pretty stupid—and it was a pretty bad fake Scottish accent, too. But you’ve got to pass the time—and time, I’ve got a lot of that.
I’ve got a lot of all kinds of other things too. A lot of car, a lot of attitude, a big old sense of humour. A pretty big wallet back behind me. A fair amount of gut out there in front of me, too.
I sell. That’s what I do. I’ve always sold, one way or another. They call me a “manufacturer’s agent,” but the truth is, what I’m really supposed to do is to get a product, any product, into someone’s hands and make them think they absolutely have to have it. Right now, it’s energy drinks—whatever the latest thing is, guarana, enough caffeine to straighten curly hair, you name it. Ten tablespoons of sugar hidden in a liquid thick enough to stand a spoon up in. In the past, it’s been fruit juices, snack food, and once, for a while, even agricultural machinery. Agricultural machinery—I was a fish out of water with that stuff, even if I did manage to unload some once in a while. The money was good when you sold something—even three percent is a lot when you’re selling something in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, just ask a realtor—but sales were few and far between. Ever buy a combine? Exactly.
Back in Halifax, I’ve got a little apartment in a big building full of neighbours I’ve never met, satellite television for company, and one goldfish who seems to be impossible to kill. I just give it as much of the food as I think it will take until I can get back again, and when I do get back, it always seems to have managed to stay alive. And if he—or she, I guess—dies, well, goldfish all look the same, and if you’ve given them all the name Fish anyway, they’re pretty much interchangeable.
I hang the suit bag by the side door, back passenger side, enough clothes until I think I’ll be back, and I take that into the motel with me every night, unless I want to advertise that I want someone to bash in my window and take whatever I’ve got. I bring the suitcase in and the samples too. Some people tell you they’d love to be travelling all the time, but a long time ago in a motel outside Corner Brook, Newfoundland, I spent most of the night listening to a bathroom tap dripping and had a little epiphany. There’s a word for you. And here’s what I mean: hotel rooms are all pretty much the same, just different places on a scale, and there isn’t much you can call romance even in the good ones.
Maybe the good ones do stick in your memory for a bit, but the really bad ones do too—and there are more of the bad ones. I had a room near Amherst, N.S., that smelled like someone had thrown up in it. The carpet was soaked, like they’d run a faulty steam cleaner around the place that couldn’t suck the water back up again, so I had to make a path from the bed to the bathroom with every single towel from the rack. There was another where I was right up over the bar, and when the band finally stopped and I got to sleep, the whistle blew for a four a.m. shift change at the paper mill. And too many times to count, there was a couple going at it in the room next door like it was some kind of Olympic event and they were damned if they weren’t going to medal at least. Another place, none of the tiles in the bathroom seemed to be anchored to the floor, so that moving around the bathroom was like a stroll around a quarry.
But as long as the rooms are clean, I suppose I can live with it.
Driving eventually becomes the same too, regardless of how big your territory is; even new roads look just like the ones you’re familiar with. I’ve got all four Atlantic provinces in my district now, from New Brunswick, where the roads are too narrow and too dangerous for my liking, to Nova Scotia, where urban is urban and rural can be, well, more than a little scary for the uninitiated. I saw a couple of guys near Kentville pushing a new bed home from a Stedmans store there once, just the two of them heading off into the distance, pushing a bed on those little metal casters for all they were worth. Stop to talk to them? Not likely.
Prince Edward Island? P.E.I. might be a great place for a summer vacation, but they’re not so welcoming when it’s winter and it seems that just by being there you’re keeping some Islander from getting a job. I don’t expect a lot of love in P.E.I., not in a big car with Nova Scotia plates. And Newfoundland? Sheer mathematics is against you from the start. A lot of ground to cover, not enough people, and not a lot of disposable income. Not much in the way of commissions to show for it. But it’s part of my territory, and I’m expected to get out there, so I go through the island a couple of times a year, end up there for a month or so in summer if I can manage it, the same old familiar loops of highway over and over again.
And everywhere, I pick up hitchhikers. If I feel like it. If they look like people I’d like to talk to. Yeah, I know it’s dangerous, but it really is better than talking to myself, no matter who I’m trying to sound like.
Once, outside Sussex, New Brunswick, it was a teenager in a long coat with a machete right up his sleeve. Couldn’t even bend his elbow, his arm right out straight next to the door the whole time. I didn’t see it until he got out of the car, so I guess he didn’t think he needed to whip it out to protect himself from anything. But I saw it as soon as he closed the door, the blue-metal flash of the big curved tip. I dropped him near Saint John, in Hampton, I think, and afterwards I’m pretty sure we were both relieved.
Stopped for a woman on the side of the road in New Glasgow or Truro one summer. Whichever town it was, it was right above the Heather Hotel, anyway, you don’t forget a place with a name like the Heather Hotel. And this woman—not young, either—she had her feet out of her shoes and up on the dash before I even got the car back in drive, and she was putting bright red nail polish on her toenails. Even had the little bits of cotton to stuff in between her toes, putting the enamel on as smooth and easy as you like, her in a little spaghetti-string top with these great tufts of hair coming out of her armpits like she was sprouting moss or something. The only thing I could think of was that I wished we were coming up on a bridge, so I could hit the seam in the pavement real hard and see if that would mess up her toenail-painting technique.
She told me she was going to British Columbia, that “life was easier there,” but she didn’t have much luggage and she must not have had much money either—offered to stay with me in my hotel room in Moncton, but I bought her dinner and begged off instead.
One of the worst? A guy I picked up almost next to my hotel in Bathurst, a big burly guy in a jean jacket who must have seen me loading my sample cases into the trunk, because he tried to rob me until I opened the trunk for him and he realized he’d just won a year’s supply of high-octane sports drinks. More than a couple of those a day and he’d have been jitterbugging like a crazy thing around the back of whatever police car they finally put him into. I don’t think he even realized he was a hitchhiker until he saw the suitcases going into the trunk—guys like him give the whole bunch of them a bad name.
And then there was Lisa. The worst one of all.
She was almost in the middle of the road when I saw her first, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, and it was pounding down rain, halfway down the Salmonier Line about as far east as you can go on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. I’ll tell you, May isn’t always the friendliest month in that province, not even the last week of May when everyone else in my sales district has all the leaves out on the trees already. I was coming around a curve at the bottom of a long hill, coming around the curve fast the way you do when it’s a little after seven-thirty on a dark spring morning, full of rain, and there’s nothing else in sight. You watch for moose that hour of the day, not for chop-cut dyed pixies in soaking-wet Levi’s.
And there she was, looking right at my car and waving her arms over her head in that frantic way that means anything from “Give me a lift to the store, would ya?” to “My parents’ car is over the embankment and they’re trapped down there.”
So I stopped, and she came around to the driver’s side window, a little slip of a thing like a drowned rat, and she struck her hip off the mirror, hard—I could see that in her face, the flash of pain, and then she put her left hand down and rubbed where she’d hit.
“I’m trying to get back to the cabin,” she said.
“What cabin?”
“I don’t know. The cabin. I haven’t been out here before, so I’m not really sure. Can you give me a lift?”
There are cabins off the Salmonier line, alright, a fair number of them, and I can tell you just where the side roads go off, because I’ve driven by them more than a few times. I mean, even if you’re on your own on the road all the time anyway, sometimes you like to turn off the main drag and see how the other half lives. You know, the ones with houses and families and cottages and Jet Skis and the cold beer on a big deck next to the barbecue. But there weren’t cabins where she was, just a few miles above where the road goes across the Salmonier River. She was close to the gas station, and I looked in the mirror before I stopped and there was nothing back there behind me but empty, wet road.
It was pretty clear she was drunk, or at least had recently been drunk. There was a smell coming off her, a smell like plums or something, the smell that always lets you know someone’s been drinking. I looked in the mirror again, hoping someone else would be coming, that maybe I could pass the buck, get moving and let her take her chances with the next car. It was still pretty dark, and the spruce trees come right down to the road there, so it all looked like something out of Little Red Riding Hood. I was just waiting to see the wolf, and meanwhile the girl was cold and wet enough that she had started to shiver.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do.” And I reached across and unlocked the passenger door.
She walked around, and I watched as she trailed her hand, the tips of her fingers, along the edge of the hood as if her balance depended on the contact. She got in, fell into the front seat really, her hair all stringy and down around her face, soaking wet. I wondered for a moment about the seat, pushed the thought away, looked straight at her. She had a small face, framed in by her hair, a snub nose but pretty, and she was right on that age line where her face was changing into what it would look like for the rest of her life. That spot where you lock down the laugh lines or a permanent pout. Blue eyes that would be prettier if they managed to focus a little better.
“Paul Lambert,” I said, and I stuck out my hand like we were being formally introduced somewhere. She just looked at it for a moment, like it was a fish she was trying really hard to focus on but wasn’t really interested in touching, and then grabbed it.
“Lisa Rhodes.”
I’ll admit it’s not the brightest thing I ever did, telling her my real name and everything. Or any of the rest of it—none of it was really bright. I know it’s always easier looking backwards, when you can look at any one of those hundreds of spots where everything could be different, where you could have said, “Well, that’s it, then, have a nice day,” and you could just walk away, take a different turn.
But that’s not the point.
“I’ve been walking on this damn road for hours, and it hasn’t stopped raining once,” she said. It looked like she was telling the truth: she was soaked through, enough so that I could see the lines of her bra under her shirt, and on both sides of the road all of the spruce trees were pulled downwards from the weight of the water on their branch tips.
“Where were you going, anyway?” I asked.
“I was up at the cabin, some friend of David’s place. Over there.” She waved her hand over her shoulder. “All guys. All drunk. You can imagine where that was going.” She looked confused for a moment, as if she had lost her train of thought, and then her face cleared a bit. “So I started walking back to town. I think back to town.”
“Town’s an hour’s drive,” I said. “I don’t know how far it would be walking.”
“Whatever. I guess I thought they were supposed to come looking for me, right?” The girl was looking out the window as rain poured down the outside of the glass. “And maybe they were going to apologize for being such dicks.”
With her inside the car and the windows rolled up, the smell of booze was much stronger. It was the kind of smell that would get you into the back seat of an RCMP cruiser for a date with the Breathalyzer, if a cop pulled you over for speeding or no turn signal or something.
She leaned against the window then, and it made it seem as though just reaching the front seat was the end of a long climb, and she was perfectly happy with staying put and thinking over how hard done by she was. Like she was more concerned about how it was everybody else’s fault that she’d gotten into this jam than she was about how she was going to get out of where she was now.
Guys, you know—we like to jump right into problem solving. Even if no one’s asked us to solve anything yet.
“I can’t run you back into town—I’ve got places I’ve got to be this morning—but maybe you can go back to the cabin. Maybe they’re all sleeping it off by now.”
She didn’t answer.
“Which way did you come from?”
“Don’t know. It was dark. You’re right—they should be sleeping by now. We were doing tequila shots at four and Dave had already passed out when I left. I just stumbled out and kept walking. I only found the highway ’cause a car went by and I saw the lights.”
She would have needed those headlights. People who work all the time in the city, they don’t really know about dark. Out on a highway without street lights, rain clouds covering the stars and any moon there might be, you’re lucky if when you stop for a piss you can still find your zipper. I tried to picture her making her way along the road, one foot on the pavement, the other on the gravel, just to keep moving in a straight line. Lose your way just a bit in the black and the next thing you know, you’re right in the middle of the road. I had my alternator go once, night driving on the highway just up from Gambo, and when the battery went dead, it was like I’d gone blind or something. I used my cellphone—not to call anyone, not way out there, but to use the light on the display to get my stuff out of the trunk and wait for a car to come along.
“Do you remember coming down a hill,” I asked her carefully, “or did you just walk along the flat?”
“Down a hill, I think,” she said, and then she smiled a bit for the first time. A little lopsided, but it sure brightened up her face. In a nice way.
“There are a couple of places—back at the Deer Park, or maybe the Colinet Road. Any of that sound familiar?”
“No. The cabin’s brown, I think, and there’s a white pickup out front. Dave’s truck. Big truck.”
I told her we could take a look, that I’d drive her back up the hill and we could see if she recognized the place. By then the rain was coming down in sheets again, and if anything, the sky was getting darker. Water was rushing downhill at us in the ruts on the pavement, and when we turned in the Deer Park, the trees were whipping around in the wind. We drove past a few cabins, then a few more, sometimes just driveways, and the puddles were hiding bigger and bigger potholes the farther back into the woods we got. I’d point to a place and she’d look, shake her head and rest the side of her face against the window—and every time, she seemed more and more resigned.
“I’ve only been there once,” she said thickly. “If I see the truck, I’ll know it.”
“Are you sure you came downhill?”
“I think so. I dunno.”
The air in the car was getting strong, and then the rain was slacking off again, so I opened the window and swung into a driveway to turn around. “We’ll try down on the Colinet Road,” I said, but she didn’t answer. I thought for a moment she might have been sleeping.
After that, the conversation got a little bit strained. Well, her part of the conversation did. I kept talking, and every now and then she’d grunt or throw a word in somewhere. We had a twenty-minute drive or so in the other direction, and I told her about being on the road, about hotel rooms, the whole thing. How you meet lots of people but have to make your mind up about them really quickly, because you don’t get to spend much time with them before you’re gone again. And sometimes she’d rouse herself for a minute or two, enough once to tell me that she had finished school and had been working at everything from landscaping to home care, trying to find something that suited her. About her basement apartment, and how she wanted to get a car of her own.
I think I told her about ten times as much. Heck, I even told her about Fish, and then I told her I thought she was one of the ones that was all right, but by then she was really drifting—when she looked at me, it was like only one eye was focusing on me at all, the other one kind of drifting away as if it had lost the only line between boat and wharf. Not a pretty look for anyone. We passed more cabins, she shook her head, and we got to the end of the road and I got ready to turn around again, and I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to get her out of the car. She hadn’t seen anything familiar anywhere, not a landmark or a familiar sign or anything.
And then she was sound asleep.
She was right out of it, and with the car stopped to turn, I got my first real chance to have a look at her, curled up against the door with her two hands, palm to palm, tucked in under her cheek. And then I took my right hand and reached across and brushed the side of her face, her cheek, with the back of my hand. And I swear, she nuzzled over, moved towards me and smiled with her eyes still closed, smiled like she liked the feel of it, as if she liked being there, as if she even liked me. Somehow it seemed as though she belonged there in the car—and sure, she was only in her twenties or so, and I’m in my forties, so mathematically she could have been my kid, but you know, it’s not impossible, you hear about it happening with other people and everything.
There’s a little shift that happens, and it happens all the time, in all kinds of circumstances. Like your eyes suddenly are working a different way, and you size everything up differently. It’s like when you make the sale and you sense it: even the air changes, and you know from their expressions you could practically say, “Our drink is made with only the finest crushed glass,” and you know they’d go ahead and buy it anyway.
That’s the way I felt, looking at her. Like it was the difference between someone you’ve just met and someone you know. Like I could know what she was thinking, and what she wanted, and maybe it was me. A long shot, but maybe it was me.
Don’t get me wrong here. I mean, I know all about “no means no” and I would never—but, I mean, she wasn’t saying no.
She wasn’t saying anything.
I just kept looking over at her when I started driving again, at that little sort of half smile and the way her hair had dried all feathery in around her face. We were just driving back up the road by then, no point to it really, the cabins going by on one side, and I knew that eventually I’d turn around and the cabins would all be going by again on the other side.
Then I just turned the car up one of those narrow little forestry roads, the ones where you push through a tight little throat of spruce trees and then you pop out on a full-sized logging road back along the edge of some clear-cut, green just starting to come up between the wet-black stumps, and I stopped and put the car up into park.
The rain had stopped completely, and we were up pretty high, the front of the car pointing out over towards the river, and mist was jumping up from the bottom of the valley. Jumping up, rising fast, coming out from under the trees in fast, reaching fingers.
It was an older clear-cut, the slash all knocked down by age, the sort of place where, even though it looks like a war zone, enough time has gone by that you know nature’s going to take right over again, that it’s just been biding its time until it’s sure you’re gone. Time can heal some pretty big wounds. Fireweed first and raspberries, then the quick deciduous trees like alders and impatient birch.
Lisa didn’t wake up when I turned the engine off. I could hear her breathing, I could almost feel the long, deep breaths. Stertorous—that one’s as big as epiphany, and every bit as precise. She was out of it, out cold, probably unconscious.
I got out of the car and looked down the long clear-cut into the valley. It’s strange—we spend so much of our time around people, it’s almost impossible to take in a big long sweep of trees and stumps where there’s absolutely no people at all. No one in sight. No one who would hear anything. Some old, flattened cardboard beer boxes on the forest road, soaked through and coming apart, so there had been people recently, but not now. The air full of that smell of wet that you get after rain, the tinny sharp smell that makes you say, “Yeah, I remember that,” just before you go ahead and forget about it all over again.
I remember hitching my pants up over my ass. I mean, with a gut like mine, I know I’m always hitching up my pants. They’re always heading somewhere south, almost like they have a mind of their own, and they’d like to be somewhere warmer. Like Cuba. But I remember that time, that hitch, like it was some kind of punctuation, as if it meant something particular, as if it were a step forward the way a ratcheted gear turns—always forwards, never back.
Always done—never undone.
I went around to Lisa’s side of the car and looked in through the glass at her, and it struck me that she was a far prettier girl asleep—that talking, or at least talking when she was drunk, made her face move in almost unattractive ways. I thought that, lying there asleep in the soft light coming through the mist, she was possibly as pretty as she would ever be in her entire life.
I opened her door, and she snored a little, but she didn’t move, and I lifted her legs out through the door, her head sliding back against the side of my seat. She shifted a bit, but her eyes didn’t open. Her mouth went slack, though, loose almost, and that was jarring.
I was picturing her just like that, exactly in that position, leaning back against the seat—but I was picturing her after I’d taken her pants off, naked from the waist down and her legs spread and hanging out through the front door, the balls of her feet touching the ground.
I mean, I could have done it, could have done all kinds of things, and no one would have known a thing. Even if she woke up or something, even if she called the cops, just her word against mine, and me a working stiff with a clean record.
I could just say I didn’t do it. Just like that: I didn’t do it. Who would they believe?
Somehow, all at once, even imagining it, even fantasizing, it wasn’t the way I thought it would be. It was like a crime scene photo on a television show. And in my head it was like someone had switched a light on for a moment, and just as quickly switched it off again. That spot where all the possibilities become impossible.
Worse—they became ridiculous.
I became ridiculous.
I don’t like to think about that.
Nothing happened. I swear. Absolutely nothing happened. Anyone says anything different, they’re lying.
I don’t know why I feel like I have to keep saying it, but I do: nothing happened. I’d tell the police that if they asked me, and I’d try real hard to keep my face straight, because I always get nervous when I’m afraid someone thinks I might be lying.
I left her, wide-eyed and sitting on a swing set by the school down there in the valley by the river, looking for all the world like she was ten years old or something. She was awake by then and the rain had stopped completely, and she was pretty much dry again anyway. Lisa thanked me for trying to find the cabin, and said it was good of me to pick up a drunk stranger and let her sleep it off in my car. Good that a stranger would be willing to keep an eye on her.
I didn’t say anything about that. I told her she should just wait, but that I had appointments down at least as far as St. Vincent’s, maybe even Trepassey, and I’d keep an eye open for her when I was coming back up along the Salmonier Line, that if she was still there I’d give her a lift back into the city. Except I wasn’t going to be looking, at least not in the way that meant I’d actually stop if I saw her.
After that, I kind of forgot about her for a while. I mean, there aren’t a lot of stores on the way down, but there was a lot of fog, and the road winds right along the coast, so I guess I kind of slipped into the driving part, and then, in the stores, right into my patter about which energy drinks were best and how, if nothing else, they’d get the cleanest, highest margins on ours, a storefront display and prizes for customers who could be bothered to peer down inside empty cans to find a machine-written code.
By the time I headed back, six places had agreed to go on our distribution list, and that was a pretty good day for me, even if they never even managed to sell out their three-case introductory order.
Coming back by the school, I tried really hard not to look—I tried just to keep my eyes to the front, but it didn’t work.
She wasn’t there. At least, she wasn’t there in the quick little glance I let myself have in the end, speeding by. No Lisa, no T-shirt, no high little firm ass in tight jeans. Stop it, I said to myself, just stop it. Stick with exactly where everything stopped: no harm, no foul.
I didn’t really start worrying until I stopped for gas and the guy who owned the store said there’d been all kinds of racket, and he hated when someone went ahead and had a big May party. “Four o’clock in the morning, and some drunk girl is pounding on my door, loaded, and don’t think I’m going to go out there to let her in. Pouring rain, and she was howling. But who needs the trouble?”
I told him I’d given her a ride, that she was only a tiny thing, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet—and she was soaking wet, too. And how much trouble could she possibly be, anyway?
“I’d think twice before I did anything like that,” he said, and he was shaking his head, putting the sandwiches and the water into the bag. “You’re a guy alone in a car, and you picked her up?” He handed me my change. “These days I’d think twice about that for sure.”
And that got me thinking.
I mean, if she got it into her head to say something about me, to say I’d done something, it’s just my word against hers. It doesn’t matter that I could tell them that nothing happened, not if she was saying that something did.
It would be even worse if I lost it and tried to lie about it, tried to say I hadn’t seen her at all. You hear about the police using DNA evidence all the time in the papers, about how there’s always a drift of particles, of skin and hair and cells, coming off us all the time—so even if I said I hadn’t picked her up, there’d be plenty of proof that I had.
I can lie with the best of them about whether or not you need whatever I’m selling this time, but I’m not so good about lying to cops. Or to my mother. Or to anyone else who’s willing to stare hard at my eyes and wonder why I won’t look straight back at them and hold their gaze.
What if she didn’t turn up somewhere afterwards? I mean, what if I dropped her off and something happened to her after that?
I know I keep coming back to this, but nothing happened up there on the forestry road. Nothing I haven’t already said. I know it just makes me sound more guilty to keep coming back to it. But I’m not guilty of anything but thinking.
You can’t be prosecuted for the things that go through your head. It’s only the things you do that are supposed to count.
After I got back to Halifax, I started thinking that maybe I’m not meant to be on the road anymore. Too many hotels, too much travel. One too many close calls. I know for sure that I’m not meant to be picking up hitchhikers. Maybe the smart thing to do, the next time they offer me some management thing, is to park the car for good and get used to a desk instead.
Buy a house. Meet someone. Get a real life.
Me and a goldfish and a wife. And smaller things to worry about when everyone else is sleeping.