link,” Jason Bose said as he turned his gaze
from the yard where a Lincoln Continental shed rust towards his
father whose fingers comforted a mug’s ceramic surface
with its cryptic proclamation of World’s Greatest. He leaned
across the kitchen table to shorten the void that separated them. “You
blink for that frigging homemaker,” he said. “I’m
you’re son. Blink for me.”
His father’s taxidermic eyes remained fixed on an unmade
bed at the end of the trailer hallway. In the yard, a truck approached,
disturbing a robin scrounging through gravel for grubs.
“World’s greatest nothing,” Jason said. Three
days home after six years in foster care and already his father’s
immobile face and hula dancer tattooed arms sickened him. He
hated the sight of the old man’s steel-toed boots lined
up straight as arrows, going nowhere and familiar cleft chin
and thin lips on the face of a stranger. “Last chance,” he
warned as he hoisted his backpack and buckled the straps.
A woman with a halo of preternaturally red hair invaded the
kitchen without knocking. Setting down a full laundry basket
on the table, she said, “Not leaving already are you?”
“Nothing to stay for,” Jason said.
“How about staying for him?”
Jason pushed past the woman and headed for the open door. “Like
I said, not a goddamned thing.”
he roll and crash of bowling balls, the sting of nicotine
rich air, the buzz of conversation; these familiar things failed
to calm Jason as he drank alone at a table in the loft of a bowling
alley. One year had passed since his return home and subsequent
flight. He fingered a cigar, a Romeo Y Juiliete full-flavoured
Cuban and a luxury at ten dollars a pop. His lucky cigar would
be saved and smoked after the provincial bowl-off that he planned
to win. His desires were simple: booze and tobacco, cash in his
pocket and the company of easy women.
A blonde-tipped brunette sauntered past his table wearing a
tee shirt that advertised her as a Bowler Babe. “Hey, sexy,” Jason
said. They had not met since the night they had split--the night
Jason had broken her heart or vice versa. He no longer remembered
how that particular cookie had crumbled.
“Shh!” She rolled bovine eyes towards a small,
stocky man paying for drinks at the bar. “I’m a married
woman now.” As she held out a diamond-studded wedding band,
her breasts wagged.
Jason looked from her chest to his half-empty glass.
“You blew your chance, baby,” she said.
Jason remembered. He’d screwed up. He took a swig of
beer and stole a glance at the woman’s face. Not so much
as a scar or a piss-yellow stain left as proof. Their break-up
must have been three, maybe four months ago. “No big loss,” he
said.
“Asshole. You’ll always be lonely, you know.”
Jason angled his bottle in the direction of the cash register
where the new groom postured rooster-like, a cold beer in each
hand and a challenge in his undersized eyes. “At least
I won’t be hitched to a looser.” Jason lifted a finger
from the bottle and flipped the man a bird.
“He’ll kill you!”
“Well, you know what they say. A change is as good as
a rest.”
With the man’s fifth punch, Jason’s jawbone shattered.
The frayed ends of a live wire snaked through his brain in a
private light show. He slumped against the railing.
“No!” the woman screamed.
The man punched again and this time Jason fell over the railing
in slow motion.
A bowling ball hurtled past as he landed on his back in lane
three. A million
miles away his ex-girlfriend’s face blanched and her mouth
stretched into an O. So that’s what the old man felt, Jason
thought. It could be worse. There could be pain. Then he thought
nothing at all.
oise got to Jason: the racket of Newton’s seedy streets,
the sirens (police, fire, and ambulance), the fights (fist fights,
cat-fights, lover’s spats). Some nights there were gunshots
or arrests made outside his window and every night drag racers
kicked up stink.
Noise made him crazy and so did his wired jaw. Time moved like
an ant in syrup as Jason lounged at his kitchen table and sucked
rum and Coke through a straw. Pushing aside a mess of unpaid
bills and an eviction notice, he found a full bottle of Empracet.
After shaking out three tablets, he crushed them, refilled his
glass with whiskey and added the powder. A half-smoked Cuban
cigar lay on the table. The tip rested beside a crescent moon
scorched into the Formica. He slipped the cigar between swollen
lips and lit it.
With his drink and the cigar, Jason moved to the couch and
switched on the television. He surfed past commercials for leak-proof
diapers, roach hotels, and Mother Nature’s gasoline until
he found an old Yukon documentary on CBC. The camera panned a
ridge of violet mountains before it faded to an open pit mine.
Helpert Mines, Everlasting, Yukon the caption read as Henry’s
co-worker explained the workings of the mine. Jason hurled his
drink at the screen. By rights of seniority the man in the shoot
should have been his father.
weet Moses!” Jason’s seatmate on the Vancouver
to Whitehorse bus said. “Elephantiasis already! Last time
I made this trip, they had to carry me off the bus.” The
elderly woman popped a peanut into her mouth and offered Jason
the bag. “Sitting makes my legs puff up like shrimp chips
in hot oil.” Ignoring the woman, Jason zipped his black
leather jacket against the cold and shut his eyes.
“Here, dear. If you won’t have a peanut at least
share my blanket. With the prices we pay to travel, you’d
think they’d heat the bus.” The woman dealt a section
of crocheted blanket onto his lap. “Where’re you
headed?”
With his eyes still shut, Jason said, “Home.”
“Good on you. You should talk to my daughter for me.
I said to her, would it kill you to make the trip home just once
before I die? And do you know what she said?”
“No,” Jason said.
“‘Yup’. That’s what she said. Honestly,
sometimes I don’t know why I bother.”
As the engine chugged up a steep grade, Jason concentrated
on the comfort of the woman’s blanket. He tried to picture
home and came up with a blank.
n the early hours of morning, the Greyhound bus dragged its
haunches to a stop. Hydraulic doors glided open. A ribbon of
fresh air teased Jason awake. The hour, four-thirty AM, felt
queasy and he considered skipping breakfast to save his limited
cash.
His seatmate woke with a start. After cracking the stiffness
out of her neck and back, she jostled Jason. “Pit stop,” she
said. “And none too soon. I could hold my own in a pie
eating contest right about now.” Jason restored the blanket
to her lap and eased his body into the aisle to join the slow
shuffle of passengers. “Bringing up the rear,” she
chirped.
After the confines of the bus, the vast space outside felt
too brisk and too real. Mackerel clouds swam upstream in a phosphorescent
sky. Trees, cloaked in darkness, surrounded the truck stop. Jason
shivered in his thin leather jacket as he walked past gas and
diesel pumps towards a carved grizzly bear that guarded the entrance
to a log restaurant.
The restaurant’s windows reflected the passengers, loaded
down with chattel and heads bowed against the chill as they funneled
into the restaurant. Taped to the window, a sign advertised the
Early Bird Special. Three eggs, two sausage links, three strips
of bacon, hash browns and coffee cost eight ninety-five. Jason
moved to the lee of the building and lit up his last cigarette.
Beside the first, a second sign read, Help Wanted.
An hour later, the Greyhound took to the road, minus one passenger.
Elbow deep in grease-clotted water, Jason didn’t pause
watch it go.
ive years later, Jason hitched a ride home to Everlasting
from Whitehorse with a taciturn miner. They arrived to find the
village of Everlasting seemingly deserted. No trespassing signs
guarded decayed buildings with boarded windows. Overturned trash-cans
rolled on their axis in dirty snow. Jason passed Goldwell, Caravan
and Croesus streets without guessing the gold-rush optimism of
the names. On Croesus a lone dog growled on the edge of a yard.
A cardboard man hung by a noose and a Canadian flag glowed purple
in a bedroom window.
Streetlights flickered as Jason’s ride drove past Camel
Alley. The alley ended at the doors of the community centre where
Jason had attended a Halloween dance six months after his mother’s
death. His father had chaperoned dressed as a wino with an authentic
drunken swagger.
“I was twelve when I watched my dad take a baseball bat
to the head in there,” Jason told his ride. “At a
kid’s frigging Halloween party. What kind of prick does
a thing like that in front of a man’s kid?”
His ride cast a glance his way. “Fuck,” he said
as he pulled the truck to the curb and parked. “You’re
Bose’s boy.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“So get out,” the man said.
ud-caked trucks ranged the length of Jo-Jo’s Bar and
Grill. A crudely painted sign advertised the establishment as
a SAD Free Zone. Shrugging off a chill as he entered the smoky
dinning room, Jason obeyed the Please Don’t Wait to be
Seated sign held by a free-standing cardboard waitress. He poured
himself a cup of coffee at the bar and then took a seat near
the window. A waitress approached with a menu and a pot of coffee.
The flash of a smile revealed an incisor decorated with a four-leaf
clover. “Glad you helped yourself to coffee,” she
said. “The service here is lousy.”
“The service might be lousy,” Jason said in conscious
imitation of his father. “But I sure like the way it walks.”
ull of beer and steak, Jason slogged along the road to the
small community of trailers on the outskirts of Everlasting that
had once housed the employees of the Helpert Mine. The night-sky,
a cosmic gymnast, performed its routine with ribbons of green
and white. Bright stars shone through the colours, stars he could
no longer name. Too many years had passed since he had sat on
his father’s broad shoulders and followed a finger tracing
the night-sky’s constellations, too many years since Jason
had kept his nose to the ground.
The aurora borealis grew riotous by the time he reached home
where drifts clogged the drive. He recognized a snow-covered
hulk as the Lincoln. Sucking on a cigarette to soothe his nerves,
Jason rapped on the door. The door bounced open beneath his fist.
Inside the trailer, instead of the world’s greatest father,
he found the lonely gleam of light on snow.
[END]
© 2005 Hannah Holborn - Contributor's
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