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  An explanation on that one: while duck hunting with borrowed guns three years earlier, I broke my tibia galloping down a slope toward the spot we’d selected, on the rim of a broad marsh. Marty tied a stick to my leg and then put me on his shoulder and carried me three kilometres back to the truck. He let me drain the vodka from his flask while he drove me to the hospital. An episode like that can endear a person to you, even in the face of their obvious shortcomings.

  I was remembering all this as we stood outside the Starlite. I could hear the wind, which had taken on a coolness I didn’t welcome, and I could hear the bar’s sign buzzing. Far out in the night I could hear traffic on the highway, transports moving between Calgary and the mountains, and Vancouver beyond that, though at that moment the road in front of us was empty.

  “Don’t see his truck,” Marty muttered, lifting his bottle to his lips.

  “Whose truck?” I asked, but Marty was pitching his bottle across the gritty parking lot and striding toward the Starlite’s front door. If he heard me he ignored the question.

  Inside it was dark and musty with a checkerboard linoleum floor that might once have been black and white, but had gone grey and yellow many years ago. There were about a dozen patrons scattered about, most of them in high-backed booths, while three men in plaid shirts and leather vests slumped over the bar. The walls were wood panelled, but the chintzy variety of wood panelling, the kind your dad might have installed in your basement. It was warped in several spots. It had been a year or two since they’d gotten rid of smoking everywhere, but you could still smell the stale tobacco coming out of the Starlite’s every plank and fibre. I imagined the bar stools’ stuffing exhaling it every time another ass hammered down on them.

  Marty strode to the bar and took a stool, and I followed. The man behind the bar wasn’t very interested in our being there. He was having a conversation with one of the other men sitting at the bar. But in a moment he came to us and we ordered beers. Above the bartender’s head a small television perched on a wobbly looking shelf played a hockey game. The Flames were in L.A. The men at the bar were looking up at that through their eyebrows.

  We slumped over the bar and half watched the hockey game and drank beer for an hour or so. There wasn’t much conversation between us. Just quiet drinking. Then Marty stood up and excused himself to the men’s.

  I watched him go in the mirror over the bar. Then a moment later I watched that big steel door open and let in a blast of cool air. Riding it were a strange pair, a man and a woman, she taller than him, who nodded to the bartender, then walked past me to a booth in the corner. As they passed me I could smell them: she wore flowery perfume, and he smelled sourly and pungently of pot. They took off their coats and hung them on hooks near the mouth of their booth. The man came to the bar, chatted with the keeper, and got them a pitcher of beer and a couple of glasses.

  The man wore a knit Rastafarian hat, green, yellow, red, beneath which lay a long, dark ponytail. He wore an open plaid shirt with a black T-shirt underneath, from the front of which smiled Mr. Bob Marley.

  The woman was tall and thin. If they were to make a movie about this whole incident they’d probably cast Katherine Heigl to play her, and that could work but only if Katherine Heigl was falling apart a bit. The skin of the woman’s face was sagging a little, her elbows were bony, and her hair looked sort of like straw. But she was still pretty, there was no seeing around that. Probably as pretty or prettier a woman as either Marty or I would ever know again. She looked nice in her jeans, and she was a good three or four inches taller than Bob Marley. It was obvious to everyone present that our little Bob was punching well above his weight.

  They settled into their booth and I more or less forgot about them. Marty was taking his sweet time, I thought, and a moment later I saw the light leak out from the bathroom door as it swung open. Marty’s path back to our stools took him right by Bob and Broken Katherine, and on the way by he said, loud enough for the whole bar to hear, “Good to see you again, asshole!”

  Why would he have done that? I wondered.

  Marty fell down onto his stool and I could smell the drink on him. I realized that he’d lapped me several times over in terms of consumption. He was close to drunk; if he wasn’t already there, he was on the outskirts. I thought maybe that had something to do with his greeting to Bob Marley.

  “How do you feel tonight?” he boomed at me.

  “I feel pretty good, Marty,” I said.

  “That’s good. That’s frickin’ good,” he said. “I gotta say, though, our evening might be about to change.”

  “How so, Marty?”

  “I might have to beat that little guy to death,” he said, and he was smiling broadly. His face was red, his ears and his neck. Something was racing through him.

  “Why’s that, Marty?”

  “Oh, that don’t frickin’ matter now,” he said, and he swivelled around to face the bar. He was finishing a beer and then he ordered a shot of vodka. Then a second.

  “You want anything?” he asked me, but I just tilted my half-full glass to show its contents. “Fair enough,” he said.

  After a third shot he spun back around and faced the corner where the couple sat. He was looking at them over my shoulder and grinning. He watched them a moment and he moved his mouth like he was looking for something to say. He chuckled to himself.

  “You need a ladder to kiss her?” he shouted.

  “Fuck you,” someone shouted back, but it didn’t seem to me that it was Bob. He might have a defender in this, I remember thinking.

  “How do you fuck her?” Marty shouted to the whole barroom.

  I wished to hide then in my glass of beer. “Marty,” I asked, “do you know those two?”

  “I might’ve run into them before. Here.” Then he laughed like a clown might before it touches you in the funhouse.

  “On the way into town, am I right?” I asked.

  “Sure, sure,” Marty said. Then he shouted, “Look at him! Look at you! You look like her kid brother!” The couple was trying their best to ignore all of this. I don’t imagine they were successful. Everyone else in the Starlite had gone quiet, like villagers waiting for a bombing run to end.

  “You don’t talk much,” he said to me.

  “I don’t have much to say,” I responded. “Not much important, anyway. I don’t really know what’s going on here.”

  “What’s frickin’ going on here is that I stopped by for a sip on Saturday afternoon, stopped right here at this establishment, and I was enjoying myself, talking to blondie there. Seemed to me we were getting on great. Then her fella there comes in and starts saying some unkind things, and I got agitated because it seemed to me that if he and I were laid out on a buffet, at best he’d be an appetizer, where I’d be the main course. I could see she might feel that way too, and I was about to do something about it when I was advised that the gentleman a few stools down was a police officer. That changed my plans somewhat. So I said I’d come back and we’d finish.”

  “And you brought me.”

  “You weren’t busy, were you?”

  “Suppose not.”

  After Marty’s speech I decided I’d have a double Canadian Club, no ice, and as I ordered that I happened to glance in the mirror and notice their booth had gone empty.

  Then I heard a microsecond of shouting. My jaw went electric and the stool I’d been sitting on was suddenly beside and above me. Marty’s head was nearly staved in by the thick glass bottom of an empty pitcher, whereas I think Katherine Heigl had walloped me with a plate.

  There were shattered bits of light in my eyes, on the floor. The linoleum down there smelled of winter and salt.

  I was still trying to move my face when I heard Marty get to his feet and start to shuffle after our Bonnie and Clyde, who’d retreated to the other side of the room. Bob Marley was holding a stool in front of him and Marty, whose face was bloody, was headed over there with his fists loaded. But the bartender shouted, “He
y!” and when I could see over the bar I noticed the shotgun in his hands. There wasn’t any doubting who it was pointed at. In fact the whole room of people was lined up against Marty and, to a lesser degree, me. Clearly the other two had thrown the first, but they were local and we weren’t. We weren’t even Albertans. And we probably didn’t vote the same way either. They had their reasons is what I’m getting at.

  “Christ!” Marty shouted, then reached down to yank me up. When we got to the truck it just worked out that I climbed into the driver’s seat, though I had no business being there. I felt like someone had packed cotton balls into my skull. There was a sharp pain where my teeth ought to have been and I couldn’t speak.

  In my dreams of that happier life, things like this were securely in my past. They weren’t adventures to me anymore; they caused my heart to ache. I’d look at myself and shake my head. That happier life—the hope of it, the possibility of it—came to me in sparing moments now, like when I’d eaten that breakfast Marty had made, or when we stood in the blue twilight in the Starlite’s parking lot and it seemed like maybe we had a good evening ahead of us. But every time one of those moments sprang up it was gone again just as fast, and that happy life got further and further away, like a thing you watch blow away in a storm.

  It was full-on night now, the roads bare but for my sweeping headlights. I didn’t feel as though I was driving, but rather that the truck was driving me. I felt safe. That’s why it was so surprising to me when that tree came up. I thought, who’d put a tree there? But of course it was that we’d left the road behind. The truck wasn’t saving us, and Marty reached over for the steering wheel. He was saying something but I couldn’t hear it because of the wind whistling in the hole where the windshield used to be.

  There was an interval when I was aware of darkness, but not of anything else. I don’t know if I was conscious or not, or just what state I was in. When I came to and tried to open my eyes there was a dazzling spray of light. What was interesting was that I couldn’t be sure if the light originated inside my head or if it came from somewhere else. I know there was a helicopter, and quickly reckoned that I must be in it. The copter’s blades sounded like a series of pops. Pop-pop-pop-pop, in a sort of fast slow motion. With each pop it felt as though my head might implode. I tried to look at myself but came to find that I was strapped down. I wanted then to throw up because my feet were above my head and the level earth was a distant memory.

  I wondered about my truck, and in fact I must have asked aloud, because someone said it was gone. I thought that was too bad, because I felt a great sense of loyalty to that blue 1988 GMC, the truck that Marty had driven to the hospital after our ill-fated duck expedition, as I sat in the passenger seat and my head lolled around like a pinball and the pain felt like it had a centre and a million radiant arms. Our borrowed shotguns rattled around in the bed. It had been a good truck.

  My blood felt milky. The helicopter rose and rose, as though it was going to take me over the mountains, or into the clouds. What happened then was that I had a flashback to the moment before we’d left the road, Marty and I, in my blue truck. I had been thinking that sometimes your life isn’t the one you want to be living, even if it isn’t terrible or dire. There was nothing I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of, I had said to myself. That included Marty.

  Now in the ascending helicopter, still going up, I didn’t know if Marty was alive or dead, and I didn’t want to ask. I knew he wasn’t nearby, in my helicopter, but maybe he was in his own, thumping similarly heavenward. I wondered if we’d both wake up in the same ward, a mint-green curtain separating our mechanical beds, and laugh about all this. But I hoped not. I hoped I wouldn’t see Marty on the other side of this. It was all his doing; I couldn’t see it any other way. My head was enduring a slow explosion and my eyes didn’t seem to be working quite right. The rest of my body was at that moment either a rumour or a memory and I had to face the reality that Alberta wasn’t really working out for me. And goddamn Marty, I thought. The mountains had sent him, and it was my great desire that the mountains should take him back.

  JAMBOREE

  Buddy of mine set me up with three or four days of work doing security at the Havelock Country Jamboree. Under the table pay. Fifty thousand people camping in a field, drinking and listening to country music. I stood near a fence and nodded at concertgoers as they walked by flashing their wristbands. By the time it got dark that first night, though, I was feeling pretty useless, so I started to get drunk. I found Cub and he came by and we started getting drunk together, standing by that fence.

  Cub said, “Rupert, do you even like Trace Adkins?” Cub wouldn’t have known what to say if I’d asked him what he was doing there, so I didn’t.

  I said, “Call Frank. Let’s go see Steven.”

  We’ve all got sadness like a rot in the timbers, but Steven’s the only one who ever did anything about it. So now, every once in a while, we take a couple of bottles and go visit him where he lies beneath an elm tree in the Marmora Common Cemetery.

  Cub texted Frank and Frank said he was in. Cub and I filled our pockets with cans and found his car. I said, “Can you drive?” and Cub said, “Can I drive.” I said, “What are you drinking?” He had a can of those things that taste like melted popsicles.

  “It says,” he said, studying the can as we passed beneath a floodlight, “SOPHISTICATED VODKA COOLER.”

  “Pretty sure anything actually sophisticated doesn’t need to have ‘sophisticated’ written on it,” I said.

  “Look, though,” he said, tapping the can, “palm trees.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, “that establishes it.”

  I don’t know how late it was. I was kind of bombed. But the night felt a lot like the time we were far enough gone that we’d got it in our heads to dig Steven up. That night time felt wispy, a thing rolled out in front of us, a thing that got longer and longer as we scraped and dug, but also shorter and thinner, like it could just disappear.

  I hoped we wouldn’t try that again—digging him up. Frank had used his pocketknife to cut the sod and somewhere approaching dawn they found me on my knees hacking away at the dirt with Cub’s mom’s gardening trowel. I think we got down a foot, maybe eighteen inches. Being caught might not have been so embarrassing if we’d actually managed to dig a decent hole.

  Frank was already there. The easiest thing to do is to park at the Valu-Mart right next to the cemetery and climb up the hill. Frank’s Civic was parked there under the light, and he was leaning against the driver’s side door, smoking a cigarette. Frank has a moustache like a janitor and prescription glasses shaped like aviators, with heavy lenses tinted brown.

  The air was thick and fragrant as honey. Frank said, “I feel like a bag of glass.”

  Cub said, “You look like a bag of shit.”

  The sadness is something you think you can get out ahead of, maybe once life opens up a bit, once things settle down some. But that never happens, and eventually the sadness gathers you in and you become a part of it, and it of you, so that there’s no separating the two. Steven knew that.

  He and I worked two years side by side installing roofs. I mostly enjoyed it, felt like being up there and looking down on things gave me some perspective on my life. It made the big, scary things seem smaller, like I could get above, and so maybe beyond them. Steven felt differently.

  We crested the little hill and walked among the rows of stones. The grass gave off a wet coolness, and the stones seemed to radiate cold air into the warm night. We moved toward the big elm. In the slight wind it gave off a hissing like tires on a wet road.

  We found Steven’s plot and just sort of stood around him. We kept away and to the sides, like he was lying on top of the grass and we didn’t want to step on him. Cub saluted, then walked around the other side of the elm to take a piss. Frank smoked.

  “Sometimes I’m angry with him,” I said. “Sometimes, you know, the things he’d say.”

  Cub called, “I hear
you.” It’s healthy, we believe, to say the things you feel, even to the dead. We tell Steven, or say in his presence, exactly what we feel.

  “He could run his mouth, yes,” Frank said, “but the whole Toronto thing? You did that to yourself. Don’t pin that on Steven.”

  “There was no job,” I said. “I got there and I said ‘I’m here for the job’ and they looked at me like I was a fucking idiot. I moved everything I owned, Frank.”

  “You threw a chair at the HR guy,” Frank said. “Steven didn’t make you throw that chair.”

  “I was upset,” I said. “I was upset with you, Steven.”

  Cub tossed his cooler can away. It landed a couple of rows over and skipped off a headstone.

  “You should pick that up,” Frank told him. “It’s disrespectful.”

  “I’ll get it on my way out,” Cub said, pulling a new can out of the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. Frank and I shuffled a bit, looking over at the can where it landed.

  Things half done, things done poorly, the things we fail to maintain. That’s where you see it. There are no ways around it. My grass is never cut. My car leaks oil. All the girls not kissed. All those TV series I never stuck it out to see the end of.

  We stood around not saying anything for a time. The wind knocked things together and cars whipped past on Highway 7. The light from the Valu-Mart parking lot lip up the western end of the cemetery like a movie set.

  “I still can’t get my head around that he’s down there,” I said. “Like, him. Steven.”

  “Only not him,” Cub said.