Cape Breton Road Read online

  Innis took another hit and pinched the roach into his pocket. That day he had run from this place, a couple weeks after he arrived, he’d turned back just beyond New Glasgow when he realized how broke and how dumb he was, no idea where he was headed except away from North St. Aubin, and it had taken him most of the day to get off Cape Breton Island, Canada already feeling like just one great westward space, blank, cold. By dark he was back on the Island, not far beyond the Canso Causeway. Two short rides and his thumb was out again, hitching to the Ferry Road, to Starr Corbett’s house. He had to laugh. Grubby, stoned, swaying like a loose road sign while cars blew by him, tossing his long hair. A new Pontiac with two young women in the front seat slowed down long enough to get a good look at him, then took off. What scared them? Doper? Axe murderer? Deportee? For the first time he’d felt ugly, conscious that he could be seen entirely different from how he saw himself. Across the road some kind of small trees ran up a hillside clearing like rows of young corn. Pulp saplings, he’d thought, spruce. Bands of Mi’kmaq Indians had torn up acres of them, Starr said, so a big pulpwood company couldn’t spray from the air to kill off hardwood, it’s useless for pulp. Spraying poisoned their springs, the Indians said. Brooks, game, the forest is not your farm, not a plantation, it has life you can see and life you can’t see. But the spray had come anyway, misting over the new woods from helicopters, carried beyond its targets by shifts of wind not officially predicted but which any local would have warned them about. All right, he’d seen Indians along the highway and had never met one, but here was something for the Mi’kmaqs. He charged up the hill, yanking out the young trees, flinging them about like carcasses until he noticed the soft needles in his hand: damn, these were pines, hundreds of them, meant for bubble lights and tin angels. He found a plastic garbage bag in the road ditch and began to work the roots out gently instead of ripping them up, setting each seedling into the bag. He did not intend them for anyone’s Christmas: he would plant them in the higher woods, a cover for his own crop of weed, an excuse to his uncle for going up there, if Starr should ever ask. Did his uncle even care what Innis did up there? The moonlight had made everything hard and still, the shadows of the tiny pines diminishing up the hill behind him. Another truck had finally given him a lift and the driver, tired in the dashboard light, kidded Innis about the sack that filled the cab with a smell of balsam and damp dirt. They got to talking about the Indians and the property owners who were fighting the herbicides, and the driver said, Listen to treehuggers and we’ll all be out of work. We’re out of it anyway, Innis said, trying to sound like a local, fellas like me. And what kind of fella are you? the man said. There’s always work for them that wants it. Innis just smiled. He had a plan now, something of his own. He’d leaned his head back on the seat and watched the dark stream of trees rushing by, the road parting like a dark sea these woods he would slowly get to know.

  Snow twirled powdery off the toolshed roof The distance between houses widened in the winter months, the year-round residents fewer now, some houses empty until summer. He hugged himself. Beside the back field ran the dark gulley, its trees bare and black as iron. He was still afraid of the woods at night, of going deep into them, he couldn’t shake that: when they turned dark, something powerful came into them, and he had never known it in a city. It was not menace, the way he felt in parts of Boston just driving through, places where he wouldn’t even walk because what might happen there was easily imaginable—mugging, beating, being chased down, hassled. But in the woods he felt things he didn’t understand: nothing to fear in the usual way, but something messed with his sense of what was real. Right now he wanted spring, a warm wind, color. The brook down there was hard as stone. Last fall seemed years away, that play of light and shadow where the hardwood canopies closed over him and he was glad to be lost. If you’ve lived a winter here, you know something about this place, Starr said, anybody can live a summer. Well, Innis knew the woods in winter, the mysterious tracks, the dry creak of wood in the wind—all had been welcome to his loneliness then, sheltering, the black trees at dusk like a drape across a window, losing him in a numbness, no one demanding to know who he was, where from, why he was here. He had felt like the convict in that movie set in Siberia, a man staggering through a stark waste of conifers and snowfields that went on and on like a dream further than anyone could see, escaped from a prison into the endless trees (It’s crazy, ordering you out of the goddamn country, Mohney had said, you’re American like me, you’re from here, and Innis said no, I was born up there and I have to go back to it, for good). Whatever had watched him in those trees, it wasn’t a person. Deer, sure, from a safe distance, poised for flight, but they had no opinions about him. Birds he couldn’t name then, a script of tracks looping delicately through fresh snow, and their wings crisp as scissors when they flew. A rabbit would bolt from its cowering place, whips of fur and feet, its little pink brain unwinding through the brush like a top. But he liked to be near the road when dark came down, maybe where a streetlamp shone through the trees, not deep in the woods.

  He stepped back into the mudroom, into the smell of the big salt cod a friend of Starr’s had brought, holding it up by the tail like an animal pelt. It hung from a nail in the entryway giving off a rich odor, like salty cheese, and was there weeks later untouched until Innis wondered if maybe it was a trophy and not to be eaten at all. Starr would give its hard skin a stroke whenever he passed, Jesus, you don’t find that size much anymore, and one time you’d haul them in and need two arms to carry them. Finally he began to break off pieces and soak them overnight and they ate boiled cod and potatoes and Innis got a taste for it. He tore off a shred and chewed it to sate the munchies, then stuffed himself with crackers and cheese in the warm kitchen. A rush of optimism made him smile at the ceiling light, right up there it was in the attic, in operation, things were moving at last. Outside, each flake spun lazily past the window, he could feel snow now even when his back was turned, even before he opened his eyes in the morning, it gave a tone to the air.

  In the hallway, he studied the old photographs framed haphazardly on the wall, Granny hung them there, Starr said, I just left them the way they were. Innis liked to get right inside them, smell them, feel them. On some the glass was smoky, their corners held pinches of dust. These are people you came from, Starr told him, some of them. They seemed to Innis distant, removed, trapped in sepia shades and the blurry edges of box camera snapshots. Nothing candid in their poses, no fooling around. When Granny Corbett had stayed with them that time in Watertown when he was little, she was grey and heavy and ancient, wincing from room to room on bad feet, talking quietly to his dad in a language neither Innis nor his mother knew, saying things she didn’t want them to hear and his mother got angry and slammed doors. Granny mailed him knitted socks at Christmas that itched and brown wool mittens he never wore when he was out of sight because he wanted gloves. But she never came back, and here she was in a chair on a porch, her hair darker, her folded hands big and capable in her lap, a woman he did not know, in some summer of her life where roses curled from a trellis, and there was Starr’s brother, Munro, Innis’s dad, on a haywagon at the reins of a big dark horse, the horse turning its head as the shutter clicked, smudging its face, his dad squinting in a bright sun, solemn, uncertain. How old was he there? Younger than Innis? A Cape Breton farm boy who would, like so many others, head for Boston or beyond, and who would be struck by a car near Scollay Square years later. Worst drivers in the world, his dad was always saying, they’re right crazy, I wouldn’t own a car in Boston if I had the money to buy one. Me too, Innis had said, only nine, and he never did own one. Leaving a bar he liked on a Friday, heading for the hot flat where they lived, his dad stepped too quickly off the curb and the car threw him amazingly high and far, or so Innis had imagined it, overhearing his mother on the phone, talking long distance to Cape Breton. Later she would tell friends how bystanders heard a great thump, like a deer getting struck someone said, and then saw
him flying, stiff as a store dummy. Innis seized that picture of him, took it to his bed and dreamed it, enlarged it, drew it slowly and carefully with crayons, his father frozen there above a street, a puzzling mannequin in the air, dressed nicely in a suit they buried him in, light grey, his eyes dark circles of surprise. He had worked in a tool factory where Innis would never want to work, nights that left a man a hump in a daytime bed, grumpy at supper, his wife forgetting what she’d loved him for and drifting out in the evenings with women friends, just an hour or two, at first. She was pregnant when they married, Starr said, miscarried on that one, right here in this house, and maybe another in Watertown, if I’m not mistaken, before you came along. She wanted out of here. She never came back that I can remember, not here. I could say things about your mother, he told Innis, but I won’t, she has her weaknesses and I got mine. Munro loved her, he did, and he wasn’t an easy man himself. I know it was some hard there in Boston for a long time, for her and for your dad too, so no, I won’t say a word. But what could he have said that Innis didn’t know already? He had grown up with her, slept next to her bedroom.

  In his room Innis danced on the linoleum cold enough to skate on as he searched his drawer for wool socks. A bitter draft from the window blew about his feet. When he was a kid he’d raise the window a crack before he jumped into bed and inhale the new snow on the sill, the wind soughing outside, then warm up under the big patched quilt his Granny had sewn and sent.

  He poured water from the chipped pitcher into the washbowl glazed with yellow roses and splashed his face. He was tired enough, whacked out from getting his plants set up and tucked away, tight and edgy every moment he was doing it lest his uncle show up. But the thought of sleep depressed him, of giving himself up to it on another Friday night, marooned in the old house, Starr out with the mysterious woman. Newly wed, Innis’s mother and dad had come to this bedroom, used it until they had their own place. The very day Innis was to leave Boston she had taken his hand and whispered to him, Innis, honey, when you get there see if that commode is still in the bedroom, would you? Starr has a bathroom now but we washed with that pitcher and bowl winter and summer, cold water every morning, and I didn’t care at all at the time. Jesus, telling him that and him not two hours away from a plane flight out of the country for good. Did she have a clue how he felt that day? All the cockiness knocked out of him like they’d punched him in the heart? What do you want? she had yelled at him after he smashed the toilet, are you just crazy or what? The guy she was going with, a man she really liked, grabbed his coat and left that night, said no thanks, that kid is nuts. Innis lay in bed the next morning listening to two plumbers murmuring in the bathroom, his mind grey as mud, feeling like shit. What did he want? Only one thing: to stay where he lived, and had lived. If they had pondered day and night the worst way to punish him, the one penalty that would bring him up short, they had found it.

  In this bedroom now he had collected objects his mother and probably his father too would never have wanted. The limestone rock, water-carved, sculptured by the brook he’d pulled it out of, a piece of art. His walking stick, a thin spruce he’d whittled and peeled, oiled from his hands now, a crutch his first days in the woods when he’d fallen often, fooled by level runs of bracken fern, hidden holes, windfalls, brooks. The antlered skull of a deer he’d found wedged in the crook of a tree and soaked in bleach until it was white: it had chilled him a little when he first hung it on the wall, in night shadows or waking to it (It’s customary to keep the hide on them, you know, Starr said, when you mount them like that, with nice glass eyes, not ugly sockets, don’t ever bring a woman in here, you’ll scare her stone cold), but Innis wanted that charge of fright when he opened his eyes in the dark, it seemed necessary to get some of the city out of him. A cluster of feathers—raven, eagle, gull, grouse. Three paperback books, one on plants and flowers, another on birds, grubby and thumbed before he ever bought them at that secondhand shop in The Mines, and the book about growing marijuana he’d hidden in his suitcase at the last minute, disguised in a dust jacket snatched from one of his mother’s crappy novels, The Romance of Red Rock Castle, a kind of pretty guy in a kilt closing in on a startled woman in a strapless gown. A shed snakeskin from under the toolshed, its dry transparence had fascinated him, the faint pattern of its markings. When Starr saw it he said, hang on to it, it’ll keep the house from burning, that’s what your Granny would say. Innis had been leery of snakes, he’d leapt away from the first one that quicksilvered across his path, but Starr said not to worry, no poisonous snakes on this island or Cape Breton Island either, no poison ivy, no poison oak. He’d pinned a few of his drawings to the wallpaper, scenes of the woods, the old barn. Others he concealed under his mattress, the ones that came out of his own head. He’d done one of Starr sitting at the kitchen table, Starr grumbled about it but cooperated long enough for a pencil sketch. Innis handed it to him when he was done and Starr stared at it frowning, nodding, well you’ve got something of me there but I’m not sure what, and he handed it back.

  Innis got under a quilt, a sketchpad on his knees. It wasn’t so much that he was good with a pencil or a pen, he was, his teachers had always told him so, it was just something he’d always had to do since he was tiny. Whatever impressed him, good or bad, he liked to draw it later when he was alone. Older, and stoned, what he got on the page was stranger, more interesting, some way of looking at it he wouldn’t otherwise find.

  He started with her hat, wide and floppy, but left her face in shadow. He picked out the fur trim of her boots and gave her a fur collar, high about the neck, graceful, like her legs, one drawn up and clasped in elegant hands, the other outstretched. For company, for familiar noise, he flipped on the transistor radio by his bed, looking for that CBC station that played rock. Sometimes he’d hear a band that had been popular back home, that he might have shared with a girl as they rode in one of his borrowed cars, the girls never knew they were stolen. Background music, life needed it sometimes. But he stopped the dial when it crossed over a woman’s voice. French. Sexy, its own kind of music. He didn’t know French any more than he did his grandmother’s Gaelic, but this woman seemed to be telling a story, he could hear its rhythm. What it might be about didn’t matter, because he was imagining the woman herself: he quickly sketched her face under the hat, in lines he considered French, slender and sultry, mature, her mouth forming a word like a kiss, in her hands pages of her story. On another of his pages he could strip her if he wanted, do her nude, in beautiful detail, he had that skill. Schoolmates used to press around him, urging him to draw a woman naked. At first, when he was young, the simplest figure would satisfy them, a cartoon of curving, swelling flesh, the pubis a dark daub, and they sucked that up, it was so illicit, oh Jesus, Innis, what if the teacher sees it, they howled, groaned, went mute with awe. And as his skills improved, they wanted details, hairs, clefts, openings, a zoom shot between the thighs, they wanted anatomy, couplings, horseplay, dumb fantasies. So he added men, acrobats of erectile tissue, probing, joining from the few angles his newfound friends could think of, their imaginations were not ready for the Kama Sutra. His intricate drawings began to bore them, they drifted away, they no longer whispered, Come on, Innis, draw us a good one, they were looking for skin. Innis drew only for himself after that. His mother had saved his drawings until they got weird. I didn’t want to show those to my friends, now did I? she told him, women undressed from every angle you could imagine? You shouldn’t have been nosing around, Ma. That’s not nosing around, not as long as you’re under this roof, it isn’t.

  Women here, if he could meet any he wanted to get next to, would only ask questions as soon as he opened his mouth, where you from? and he’d have to lie and he was tired of making himself up just so no one would dig any deeper. In Watertown, the last girl he dated, an Italian, his mother told him not to bring home because she was Catholic. So he stole a car to take her to a big dance, a Cadillac convertible, deep purple with a white top, beautiful a
nd absurd, and they left the dance early to drive around, playing tapes. He told her an uncle loaned it to him and they parked down by the Charles River awhile, then drove into the wooded area outside Boston and had sex on the deep leather seats, great to get naked on, cushioned in music. After he dropped her home, the car full of perfume and pot smoke, Innis drove around the rest of the night because the car felt so fine he couldn’t give it up, and just after sunrise, as he was about to ditch it in a back street, the police caught him cruising with the top down. Wearing his pale blue sportcoat, the sun on his face, he had thought that white steering wheel belonged in his hands, but apparently he didn’t look it, they were on him so fast. After his mother bailed him out, he called the girl but she wouldn’t come to the phone. You’re a bum, her mother screamed at him and hung up. That was the last fun car before his mother saw him in the Lincoln. He was on probation then already. She was wild, she pulled up beside him at a traffic light honking her horn and he had to floor it to shake her, cutting down side streets. When he got home after midnight she was still up. I’ve got the license number of that car you stole, she said, they’re probably still out there looking for it. You don’t pick cheap ones, do you? What was that, a Lincoln Continental? I was taking it somewhere, Ma, for a friend. Stop lying to me, damn you, Innis. If they nail you again, you’ll be out of here, they’ll ship you home. Home? he said, I am home. She said, don’t kid yourself, they’ll show you where home is. Bullshit, Ma. I’ve lived here since I was what, two? I’m as American as anybody. She said, sometimes I don’t think you’re wrapped too tight. If they find out you’re not a citizen, they’ll deport you, they’ll let the Canadians have you. Listen, I want you to get yourself to Cape Breton and stay with your Uncle Starr a couple months, now, tomorrow. You haven’t been there since you were a tot, but that’s okay. You do this, you disappear up there or so help me I will turn you in myself. They don’t know half the cars you took. They’ll be around soon enough, if they’re not at the door in the morning, I’ll be damn surprised, they got plenty on you. He said, I’m not going back there and you can’t make me go back. They got nothing on me. I’m not driving the car now, am I? Is it parked outside or something? I wore gloves. No prints, nothing. His mother put her face close to his, God, you’re a stupid boy, oh Jesus, you are.