Requiem (12 page)

She and Greg began to invent their own legends during long drives and camping trips. One day, we followed a sign for a place called Hope Lane all the way to a dead end, and Lena, peeved, declared the sign to be a malcontent’s idea of perversity.

I slow to watch a fox as it crosses the road, unhurried, and disappears behind the trees. It leaves its image behind, a palette of cream-coloured fur, its winter thickness streaked with rusty red. I want to tell Lena how different the landscape is so early in the year. From the highway, it’s possible to peer inside the naked forest to witness repetitive scenes of post-winter disarray. Birches have snapped and tumbled as if they’ve retreated in disordered haste. A month from now none of this will be visible. Deciduous trees will be in full leaf and will block the view from the road. They’ll link arms with the firs and present a dense wall of forest. But for now, it’s like seeing through transparent skin.

I haven’t had breakfast and have to keep an eye out for town or village. Hunger is gnawing, but not enough to make me get out and dig through the cooler to see what’s inside—apart from dregs of melting ice. Lake Superior is on my left—the vast Great Lake, with the United States unseen on its other side. I drove away from the cabin this morning at daybreak, and did not stop to explore the creek below. The van was gone, which meant that the two women had departed, though I didn’t hear them leave. I wonder now if they left after dinner and didn’t stay overnight at all. The evil fortune sticking in the craw.

A white-tailed doe, her flanks bony and thin, is feeding at the edge of the road, attracted to traces of salt left over from heavy equipment that sprayed the highway all winter. She looks up and stares as I pass. Yellow signs with images of deer captured mid-leap are posted along the road, but these gradually change to warnings of moose: NIGHT DANGER. An antlered animal is pictured: long sloping nose, left foreleg bent, shoulder to the road, challenging any driver foolish enough to be in its path while it’s on the move.

The signs are a long cry from what I now begin to see in ditches to my right. Massive carcasses, evidence of collisions between moose and transport truck. The animals weigh close to a ton, and when I see the first carcass on its back, its limbs reaching upwards in rigor mortis, I don’t understand what it is until I drive past another, and then another. I see four in all. Hit by trucks in the night and bounced back to the ditches to die. They are black in death, charred as if by fire. Not the majestic beasts Lena and I used to see in the forests when we were hiking, the ones that clip-clopped across the highway with their big, ungainly feet. These carcasses are sculptures gone bad, miscalculated shapes. And while I’m lamenting their calamitous deaths, I drive past a shallow gully and glance down to see a live moose looking out, a high, dark hulk almost hidden by moss and fallen trees.

When I drive past the sign for Old Woman Bay, I can’t remember what it is about the place that is familiar. And then I do, and I pull over and sit there, staring straight ahead. I think of an essay I read earlier in the week and I turn the car around, drive back to the sign, leave the main road and enter a parking area where I’m at once surrounded by woods, except for a clearing before a strip of beach. The sky is big-lake sky, white and expansive, streaked with blue. Every cloud shaped with clarity. Mine is the only car in the lot, and I let Basil out the back. “It’s yours, Basil,” I tell him. “The entire place. Look out for small stones.” But he has already taken off with a yelp, running in and around the trees, ears dragging as he follows some scent. He heads for the water, passing through beach gravel, sniffing and exploring as he slows and pads along.

I follow him down to the lake, my hiking boots sliding in and out of stone broken to millions of fragments along the edge of the bay. It was Böll’s essay, Heinrich Böll, and he wrote about how one road sign, one name, could set off an outburst of memories. For me, it was this one sign that has stopped me completely: OLD WOMAN BAY.

I plunk down on a massive but smooth driftwood log. The air is cool, the sun strong. The time I cannot bypass is a summer in the seventies. The event, our first car trip, when we drove as far as Manitoba for an adventure and then aimed the car south, following the Red River for a while. We decided to go to North Dakota, then Minnesota, and we returned via a southern route home again. Southern for us, but still quite far north.

We owned a station wagon then, too. Old and clunky. We’d bought it used, at bargain price. Greg was not yet born. We travelled with a small tent in the wheel well where the spare tire was kept, along with sleeping bags and a cooler. We could be self-sufficient when we had to be. But one night we were travelling through hard rain. There was nothing around but woods and rock, and we were far from hotels and motels. We kept driving and driving until we were so fatigued it was unsafe to go on.

“We have to stop,” Lena said. “It’s after one in the morning. Even the windshield wipers are dragging.”

“Stop where? We’ve been looking for hours. There’s nothing to be had.”

“No lodgings at the inn,” she said. “But we’re both falling asleep. If we continue, we’re going to kill ourselves.”

We saw the sign for Old Woman Bay.

I pulled into this parking lot. The same one. From the car windows we saw nothing but blackness and trees. Our headlights lit up a posted sign: NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING—STRICTLY ENFORCED.

“We’ll have to spend the night in the car,” I told her. “There’s nobody here, so it won’t matter to anyone.”

The back seat was already flattened, so we climbed over and unzipped our sleeping bags. These could be used separately, as singles, or opened out flat and fitted together to make a double, which is what we did, to make a wider bed for two. We crouched low, bumping our heads against the ceiling as we zipped the outer edges and stretched out our makeshift bed. We took off our clothes and tossed them towards our feet and climbed into the padded bag, which was now spacious and warm. The car rocked every time we moved. Lena reached out a bare arm, opened a window half an inch and pushed down the locks from inside. “I don’t want any bears knocking at the doors,” she said.

Once inside the zipped-together bags, we lay flat on our backs and started to laugh. “Tell me a river story,” Lena said. “One with a good ending, not something with cataracts and turmoil that will keep me awake.”

“Let me think for a minute,” I said. “Okay, here goes. A young man was once travelling through Germany, and as it happened, it was the year before he would meet the woman who would become his wife. He didn’t know that then, because she was living in Montreal, still unmet, and he was in Europe, travelling alone. As a matter of fact, she was sleeping in his bed in Montreal, having rented his share of a student apartment while he was away.

“The young man was following the great rivers of Europe. He had a sketch pad in his pack, the usual supplies, and he was trying to capture something he could not quite put a name to, some understanding of the rivers he encountered. Something lost, perhaps, or something not yet found. He lingered in Bonn, Beethoven’s birthplace, and visited Köln and the cathedral, and he travelled upriver to Speyer and climbed the highest hill and looked down over the ancient Rhine and watched barge traffic below. He thought he would stay overnight nearby because he also wanted to see the Neckar. He had been told that it was a beautiful river, more green than blue, with castles strung like jewels at the top of the hills. He proceeded to Heidelberg and found a hotel, and while there he bought a ticket for a boat that would take him on a new journey the next day.

“The next morning, he boarded a boat that travelled upriver through a series of narrow locks. He inhaled a breath of river air, which did not satisfy in any way because the day was uncomfortably hot. The boat had two decks, and swans paddled to the side and stretched up their long throats, demanding food, which tourists tossed down: chunks of bread, pieces of chocolate, even sausage.”

“Dark chocolate? What kind of sausage?” said Lena.

“Quiet, please. People on deck were drinking beer. Small children carrying Fanta and fizzy cola ran up and down steps between decks. The boat slugged forward, but there was no breeze. And unlike the tour boat on which the young man was now captive, the passing barge traffic was remarkably swift. Colours streamed from multinational flags, towels billowed on clotheslines, bicycles leaned against shacks on broad decks. The barges sat just inches above water level, so low did their heavy loads nose through the waves.

“Across the deck from the young man was a middle-aged couple, sitting on a bench. The man was thick everywhere, squat build, large neck, rough skin. He wore short brown trousers hemmed above the knee and a pair of braces over his shirt. His wife was short, but even larger than he. Layer after layer of her body bulged from beneath a sleeveless cotton dress. She wore stockings of a bluish-white colour, as if to help remedy the swollen veins in her legs. She wiped her forehead and tried to ease herself by moving closer to her husband. At the same time, she leaned back against him. Then she slowly lifted herself sideways until she had pushed him against the inner wall of the deck. Squeezing the last bit of air from him, she turned her back, fell like a sudden blow upon him and stretched her swollen legs lengthwise along the bench.

“Jammed as he was into the corner, only bits of the man could now be seen. But he did not, as expected, push her off. Instead, he began to bounce one knee. His wife bounced and rolled with his inner tune, her eyes closed, perspiration streaming down her face. Her hand rested just below her husband’s trousers, keeping time on his bare thigh. It was a moment of such intimacy that the young man, in agony, turned away. At that moment, he would have given anything to experience the kind of intimacy he was witnessing. And then he thought,
What nonsense
. But he did not forget the couple or the intimate moment between them.”

“A revealing story,” Lena said. “In more ways than one. A story of longing, definitely.”

“But the young man was observant, you have to give him that.”

“Indeed. The scene was painted quite clearly.”

Observant but lonely, I was thinking, but I didn’t say that aloud. The young man was always—more or less—alone.

“And this present moment,” said Lena, “the one in which the young man finds himself in the midst of deep forest, is also a moment of intimacy. Too bad we don’t have curtains on the car windows. What if someone drives up?”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s so late, no one is going to drive in at this time of night. Anyway, it’s pitch black and we’ll be awake before dawn. How soundly do you think we’ll be able to sleep like this?”

We were asleep almost before I finished the sentence.

When we woke, it was hours past dawn and sun was shining through the car windows on one side. Lena raised her head and looked out and ducked back down again.

“My God,” she said. “We’re surrounded. There are half a dozen cars and camper trailers. Did you hear anyone drive in? There must have been others on the highway who couldn’t find a place to sleep. I didn’t hear a thing all night.”

But we could hear people now. The sound of many voices as families prepared breakfast at picnic tables around the edges of the parking lot. There was no way we could get dressed without being seen.

I volunteered to be the one to unzip the side of the sleeping bag, to try to gather up the clothes at our feet. I stayed low, pitched the clothes to Lena and climbed back under, and we began to dress while lying on our backs inside the sleeping bag. Not easy, I remember. And we were laughing again. The whole scene was comic because our car was parked in the middle of the lot and people were coming and going, back and forth to trailers and cars. “Who cares?” I said to Lena, through snorts of laughter. “Who bloody cares?” But every time someone walked past, we froze and pretended to be asleep.

There must have been five or six vehicles, and neither of us had heard so much as a wheel turn in the night.

When we were dressed, which took more than a few awkward manoeuvres, we looked at each other and nodded.
Ready
. We climbed out on opposite sides of the rear of the car and got back in at the front. People at the picnic tables looked over and waved. The two of us drove off.

I know the exact place we parked. Same site, same lot. I call for Basil and get him into the car, but only after offering a treat as persuasion. We are back on the highway in minutes, and I drive for more than an hour until we’re at the outskirts of a small town. By the time I see a sign for a Pancake House, it’s mid-morning, late, and I’m not certain I’ll be served. The need for coffee is greater than the need for food, and I can probably get at least that much, so I pull in. I give Basil a drink of water and leave him in the car with the window partly down, in a parking spot that can be seen from inside the restaurant.

The place is more bar than restaurant—a sports bar or maybe a hybrid, bar and restaurant combined. There are no customers in the room. A TV on a high shelf in one corner is on but soundless. Two men are wrestling in outlandish costumes, golden cocks strutting across the screen.

A tall woman with a weary-looking face is wiping glasses and she points to a table close to where she’s working. Efficiency itself, she’s fast, moving from one table to another, setting places, giving surfaces a swipe of her damp cloth, creating order from salt and pepper shakers, containers of ketchup and syrup. If I were to sketch her, I’d call the drawing
Taut motion
. She wears a black pinstriped blouse and black slacks. The blouse shines like satin. Her face is thin, her long legs thin, her hip bones prominent, no extra flesh. Everything about her brings to mind the words
gaunt
and
defeated
. It’s easy to see that her life, thus far, has not been easy.

But she is all kindness, as it turns out. And she gives the impression of intuiting some need, not in her but in me—a need that is blatant and personal. She brings coffee before I ask, offers the news that two moose, a cow and a calf, have been strutting through town since early morning, and that the police are in a tizzy. They’ve called for the local conservation officer. She hands me a menu, goes to the bar, swishes her cloth over the counter and returns to take my order. When I ask for an egg sunnyside, she says she can do egg. When I ask for toast, she can do toast. The kitchen never closes. She’ll throw in back bacon as there is extra today. I can have waffles, too, if I want them. Her body leans forward and pulls back. She leaves comfort behind and disappears behind the bar and through the kitchen door. And yet, she looks so troubled herself.