Drift, maybe fall
Fiction by Brent Van Staalduinen
By some stroke of the dumbest luck, the border is closed. No one knows who was at fault, the eighteen-wheeler heading north with a load of toilet paper or the logger moving south with forty tonnes of softwood. An instant of distraction and the two semis — the only rigs in sight — mashed it up. The fire, quick and hot, still burns. There’s no wind, so the embers drift almost straight back down, coating Gretna in a layer of ash. The town smells like a campfire.
At the motel bar, a guy wearing an orange safety vest waves his beer around, slurring about how he’ll still get paid for his time. Waxing philosophical. “Not my fault,” he says. “Company said to stay put, so — ”
“It’s the prairies, for god’s sake,” the bartender says. “There’s a crossing every five clicks, east or west.”
“Am I gonna complain?”
“Don’t suppose you would, no.” “Universe sending me a message, maybe.”
As the bartender rolls his eyes, a bell dings from the kitchen window. He grunts, grabs the white Styrofoam takeout box and puts it in front of me. “Dressing on the side,” he says, with special contempt.
“Gotta cut back on the fat,” I say. “Wife says so.”
“Uh huh.”
I drain the last of my beer and step back, ask if everything can go on my room bill. The guy in the orange vest snorts, makes a crack about The Maple Tree Motel not being the Hilton, but the bartender nods and prints off a receipt. I sign, click a toonie to the bar as a tip, and head towards the door.
I’m walking around the side of the building to get the truck, making perfect boot prints in the ash, before I stop myself and head back towards my room. Not used to parking the rig in the middle of a run. It’s out back in the extended slots, stretched long in the shadows, and heavy with office supplies for Sioux Falls. Normally I’d have found another crossing and pushed through, but dispatch is all over my ass about downtime. Cab’s not a sleeper so the regs say I have to find a bed.
A beige minivan swerves into the motel parking lot, slipping and sliding in the ash. I stop and watch, wondering if it can brake in time. A foot from the door, the van stops and a raccoon-eyed guy, young, steps out from behind the wheel, coating his white sneakers in sooty smudge. “Stay here,” he growls. There’s a muffled cacophony from inside, a mashup of young voices. “I don’t know, I’ll ask, okay? Jesus.”
The driver slams the door just as the clerk steps outside. Thick beard, checked shirt, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Really coming down,” the driver says.
“No wind. Nowhere for it to go.”
“Got a pool?”
I smile, quick, before remembering. Kids will always ask.
“Can’t remember the last windless day,” the clerk says. “Damn thing’s probably covered by now anyhow — ”
The door cuts off their voices as the two men disappear into the office. I jangle my keys out of my pocket, thumb the embossed surface of the plastic, diamond-shaped fob. IF FOUND, DROP IN ANY CANADIAN MAILBOX stamped in a circle. The sound of the lock is sharp, but the ashfall swallows it whole.
I decide to go back to the bar for some fries. Burger and salad barely touched my hunger.
My room door opens to a panorama of grey. The ash collecting against the sill sifts in, fanning out against the linoleum. The lighter particles swirl upwards into the room. I’ll end up inhaling them, probably. Stopped smoking years ago, the wife’s patient nagging about baby lungs and their developing brains finally having the desired effect, but I still worry about what might get taken in. I raise my t-shirt collar over my nose and mouth.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?”
My heart launches itself upwards with brief but great speed, ending up somewhere near my ears. “Jesus!”
Wouldn’t have seen her if she hadn’t said anything. She’s settled into one of two ash-covered, plastic Muskoka chairs the motel has beside every door. Cheap but colourful. “Feeling lonely, trucker-man?”
Nothing but bald clichés. But there’s something about the way she delivered her lines. A slight tremor behind the words, like she’s talking dirty to a new boyfriend who brought lingerie and the expectation that she’ll wear it.
“What do you want?”
She stands, ash dropping from her skirt. “Invite me in,” she says. “I’ll show you what you want — ”
She stops, tilts her head, testing my level. Smiles. A very nice smile. “No,” she says. “No. That was terrible. That’s not me.”
“I don’t understand. Do you need something? Money? A ride?”
She shakes her head, laughs like she’s blushing. “Thanks, but I’m sure they’ll dig my car out at some point. God, there has to be a foot of it out there.”
I open my mouth and close it again. She looks out into the gloom. We stand like that for a few seconds.
“Well,” I say, “I was just going to get some fries, and — ”
Her eyes brighten. “Yes, food,” she says. “Good idea. My treat?”
“Uh, okay.”
“I’m Sam,” she says. “Samantha.”
She takes a step towards the bar. I shrug and lock my door, follow her through the ash, stepping where she steps, obliterating her tiny footprints with my own. The ash is falling even more heavily now, grey and black and white. Occasionally red and orange as still-smouldering embers waft down. The air is hot through my shirt, which I’ve brought up over my face again.
She sits cross-legged on the stained carpet and I’m in the hard chair next to the Formica table. A half dozen takeout containers are strewn across the bed, a gut-busting tour of the bar’s menu. The bartender had glanced at her, and at me, then slipped a six-pack in a plastic bag with a wink. As thanks for the order, maybe. Or approval about my choice of company for the night. He asked the guy in the safety vest if he could put it on his tab. Slumped over the bar, the guy gave an unsteady thumbs up. You only live once, he said, the words barely discernible. Carpe-fucking-diem.
“So until now you’ve always made the run to Winnipeg and back on a single day?” I nod.
“So that’s, what, thirteen, fourteen hours of driving?”
“Longer if the border guys make a show of interrogating every trucker and tourist.”
But they can’t do it at every crossing. They tried in the days after 9/11, where state troopers and the RCMP right-angled their cruisers across every north-south road, highway or otherwise. A continent too scared to move. Then I get a call from the hospital in Sioux Falls patched through dispatch with few details, a stone-faced Mountie with an assault rifle cradled in his arms, a sympathetic border village without any options to offer a trucker imagining the worst.
“Way too much time behind the wheel for me,” she says. “I need my beauty sleep, haha. Still, I suppose if you do it enough — ”
She carries on. There are more questions, answers. We talk for a long time, familiar enough not to think too much, a conversation on cruise. Stories about home and life, my home in the suburbs stuffy and alien, her life as a lawyer in some eastern city being easy to walk away from. How pills and cash only delay the lawyerly burn and fade. How smart guys end up in trucks pushing goods between cities. How children die, leaving mommies and daddies to stare at unfillable spaces. Then I realize she’s stopped talking. Waiting for me to say something.
“I asked if that’s crazy,” she says.
I tell her of course not, trying to backtrack to whatever point she’s defending. “You just want control of how it all ends,” she says. “I’m not depressed — I just don’t want to go back to where I’ve left, you know?”
I’m not sure I believe her. Then she’s talking about canyons and bridges and skyscrapers, that there’s no plan, that she’ll just know. Wondering how far she’ll drive before she finds the spot. She wants to fall.
“You don’t really want to die,” I say.
No response. I hear myself apologizing. I don’t know why.
“No, I’m sorry,” she says. “For earlier. Don’t know why I came on so strong. I walked over through the ash, saw you walk into your room, thought you might like some — ”
“Some what?”
“I was going to say comfort, but that’s not it. In that moment I felt loose, like I could just take you. Insane, right?”
“No. Well, maybe.” We share a brief laugh.
“Why are you all the way over there?”
Surely it’s obvious. Still married, or trying to be. Motel strangers. Complications on a scale I can’t fathom.
“Sit beside me,” she says. “I can’t.”
She sighs.
“There’s something here — you can’t feel it?”
I focus on breathing. She uncrosses her legs, rises from the floor. A half-step to the chair. Sits in my lap, legs perpendicular to my own, slides an arm around my neck. Lays her cheek against my shoulder. A warmth arrives. Not heat. More like the kindling of some new understanding. Where you know it’s all right to stumble in front of each other.
It could be that hours pass like that before she pads to the window and pushes the curtains aside. The ash is almost to the top of the glass. I say my name to her back. She repeats it a few times, testing, before her hand comes up, wiping something away from her face. She comes back to straddle me, mute in this chair, takes my face in her hands. Her lips soft and warm — mine unmoving, words of refusal kept behind. She stretches high to take off her shirt. Lowers her left breast towards me, her nipple a wild berry in my mouth, hard and soft, charcoal and smoke.
It’s morning. Yellowed light in the room, bright and late. Patchy. The curtains a dingy plaid. My cellphone buzzes on the nightstand — dispatch, probably, looking for a check-in. I pick up my clothes from the other side of the bed, where the bedspread has been lifted over the other pillow, half-made, smoothed out as I slept. I step around the takeout containers and beer cans, my feet making soft prints in the ash just inside the door.
It’s blinding outside, and all clear. No ash anywhere, not even in the grooves and corners, as though it had never been there at all. The hush of a strong westerly flows around me and back into the room.
I sit in the Muskoka chair and watch the day begin. Fields and trees, landscape flat to the horizon. The motel parking lot is black, recently paved, already warming in the sun. The high fumes of tar and painted lines mix with the smells of wheat and dust. The guy in the orange vest walks out of his room, squints at me, and waves as he climbs into a battered company pickup. He starts the engine, lights a cigarette, and stares through the windshield a long while. Finally, he backs out and eases his way to the mouth of the lot, looking for a break in traffic, southbound, all those vehicles already at highway speed.»