Travellers May Still Return Page 2

  I’d skip school and hitchhike from Pit Meadows into town and we’d fuck all day long in her condo, then read bits from books to each other. The fucking was like a star collapsing, or maybe the universe. Or she’d drive out to the farm and we’d borrow the neighbour’s horses and ride, the rush-hour traffic streaming alongside, the stag leaping across the road into swaying black firs a warning, she said, that any crazy moment might uproot trees and unscrew signs from poles and we’d be forever suburbanite ghosts. We were okay, she said, but danger existed. She got herself hired for a few weeks on the neighbour’s farm, and we rode and talked a lot, on and on, galloping and horny, and afterward we melted down in the old barn, poured ourselves out. The more we did the more she demanded, and I really didn’t want to be anywhere without her. There wasn’t anywhere that wasn’t her. That’s the truth.

  Jesse Green was seriously moody when she was stoned on grass, and once we were lying on loose hay at sunset, watching bats twitching from the rafters and swallows swinging in and out the high barn door, and we hadn’t spoken for hours, when she said, in her faint English accent, “I’m upside down, I’m fucked,” and I stared into those green eyes amid the chaos of Dad’s barn and saw what she really was, and what I really was and promised her I’d go anywhere with her, though I didn’t believe for a second that there was anywhere to go. And I said so.

  “You’re full of shite,” she said.

  And the sun set red over the fields, the west sky, and she said we’d go, soon now, she’d take me.

  I didn’t want any kind of change. We were eternal and boundless and we toked meth and I told the accident story and she zigged and zagged. She said she was done with crack and almost done with crystal meth and was pretty sure of getting off the oxy. That’s when the little fox was born, just a pup, inside me. I remember thinking about a world where all things might be variations, everything a version of the same ripple, and I hadn’t crashed the car in Nowhere, Alberta on my fifteenth birthday because Mom and Dad were too drunk to drive, pushing the gas, pushing the car out of control, and no one was dead at all, though my face was cut up, and the others seemed dead, all of them, till doctors brought my mom and sister back. And the sky would still be the same, the world just as safe or unsafe, everything the same, but I would see it differently. I’ve been back to the stretch of prairie highway a few times, different seasons, times of day, and there must be a defect under the road, a geological fault of some kind, because the land buckles on either side, and the gravel of the soft shoulder makes a wave, and despite the repair jobs there is always a new crack next to the holes already filled with tarmac, a new gap waiting to be filled, a cave where some creature might live, and I always crouch to peer in and see dust and darkness, and once I saw the small bones of a dry bird. And because in the old world my mother was barely alive and my father was dead and my sister in a wheelchair I loved Jesse infinitely, though I didn’t want sex nearly as much as she did, and because of all this, the fifty bucks, the accident, the drugs, the fox cub, the world became an enormous, undifferentiated place. And there was nothing to escape, and that gave us the escape velocity.

  3.

  Just daylight when he got up, when Sucre got up, and even though I felt sick, the way I always feel in the morning, I got up too and sat on the bunk and watched him dress in the grungy clothes he’d taken off last night, watched him heat water on the oil stove out on the veranda, pick his nose as he cooked cornmeal, and when he brought a bowl to Jesse, I slipped out the back and threw up. Sky gleamed slate blue. The sun would soon show, after the rain, and the heat would be a weight on our heads. I dipped my cup into the rain barrel. The village women on their way to the swamp, red and brown woven bags tied empty at their waists, sang and whistled as they climbed over roots toward the receding sea to collect mussels. I dropped the lid onto the half-full barrel. Back inside, Jesse was peering from the hammock at Sucre boiling his thick oily coffee in the same pot he’d cooked the meal. I felt like my old man’s ghost as I drifted through the room, back to front, and sat in one of the cane chairs. Beyond the veranda, men stood around and smoked, then wandered in a group up to the farm fields. Small children chased chickens. The eternal feeling was still with me — I could touch it: the women to the sea, men to the fields, children dashing in circles, us in the middle. The young woman who’d sold me the serpent whistle had just slaughtered a little pig at the bottom of the veranda steps. She smiled up, her fingers full of blood. She wasn’t much older than Jesse.

  Sucre grunted, catching me looking. “You’re a dog,” he said. “That one’s already taken. She’s got a hard-working husband and a baby. You’re a lazy dog. You should work with the others.” He gestured past the shacks to the fields and the black jungle.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  He banged his cup against the wall of the house and wet black grounds fell through the boards of the veranda. “No,” he said. Then he laughed. “Okay. Today I will permit you a question.” I flinched when he moved, quickly for a fat man, and snatched the clay whistle from my fingers. “What will you do with this?”

  “Nothing.”

  The platform rocked as he crashed down the stairs. He tossed the piece back and shouted, “Ask me your question tonight. If I don’t like your question I’ll fuck you. That’s the end of it.”

  Jesse came out and we watched him mount his cab. The machine rattled into life and she shuddered.

  “Let’s see what you got,” she said.

  I held out the whistle. “Some kind of really old pottery. Where were you yesterday?”

  “Up at the ruins.” She leaned against my shoulder and turned the piece to the light. “Where’d you get it?”

  “A girl from the village sold it to me. Some kind of snake whistle. It’s cool isn’t it?”

  “Where’d you get the money?”

  “Your stash.”

  “It has horns.”

  “You’re not going with him?”

  “Of course I’m going.” She raced after Sucre’s machine, feet spraying mud, parrots in flight, and climbed on. After a moment, the bulldozer plunged into the jungle.

  I lay on the day hammock, listening to rain hammering the roof. Around noon it stopped and I heard the rotors of a chopper louder and louder then deafening. Trees to the west were bending and waving, then the glass-and-metal dragonfly spun up out of the forest and the scream faded away. A man in a filthy white suit slithered down the slope of the new road to the yard, circled the compound, glancing into the huts and up at the house. I slipped out of the hammock to the shadow of the overhang. Across the yard the huts were steaming. My fingers recognised and recognised the whistle, the snake, in the front pocket of my jeans. This was a new strand, maybe good, on its way. This was the same man I’d seen with Jesus the other night.

  Maybe it wasn’t him, but it was a similar tall guy wearing glasses, and he was carrying a large leather bag, and he looked two dimensional in the hot sun. Tears were coming. Why? Because I’m trapped, because I’m lonely. Because I’m homesick. I was ashamed of my appearance. I hadn’t washed in days. I took out the whistle and the snake uncoiled its length to fill the thick clay. I set it down on the outside table, rinsed my face in the rain barrel, pulled on my ball cap, and leaned out over the veranda railing.

  “I am looking for the manager!” the man called.

  “Sucre?”

  “Of course. That’s his name. Yes.” He was maybe thirty, and self-assured as he stepped carefully round the puddles and placed a foot on the veranda’s lowest step, one hand on the rail. “Who are you?” His expensive boots shone where they were not muddy.

  “My name is Kenneth.” I held out my hand. “Kenneth Doblin.”

  “I am Berman.” His fingers slipped through mine, and he slid past me and peered into the dark house. “You are alone?”

  “I’ve been ill.”

  “Ah. And you are not from here.” He was close, his face right in front of me. He smelled sweet. I leaned ag
ainst the doorjamb and closed my eyes and sweat ran down my back, soaked into the splintery wood. “Do you know what you are?”

  “What?”

  “You are a beautiful young man.” He took from his leather bag a bowl with a round bottom and a wide rim. The bowl, more than a foot in diameter, was cracked and bruised in places. He held it to me, sharing something secret. “Do you know what this is?”

  “A big bowl.” I touched the heavy chipped rim. Two circles, thick black lines, followed the edge. Black etched columns divided the outer surface into panels. The glaze was an ochre colour, and the exposed clay along the cracks where the glaze had flaked was rich red.

  “No, not a bowl. Not a bowl.”

  He likes boys. He likes me. We were close together, in the same places as Jesus and he had stood nights ago. Bloody footprints on the steps from the murdered pig. Sunlight through a hole in the overhang cut across his stark figure in the middle of the veranda. He was looking at the reed table.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “The Pedrarias Estate.”

  “This was found recently, Mr Doblin.” He turned the bowl, whatever it was, bottom up. “It’s an urn cover. A burial urn. Very old.” His lips were thick, babyish. Our hands touched the glaze. An electronic beep went off and he slid the urn, whatever, back into his satchel, sat at the outside table and flipped open his phone. “Chucha . . . the connection is shit. Do you have a land line?”

  “When the road is finished. So they say. Mr Sucre keeps the satellite phone locked up.”

  “Shit. Could I have a drink of water?”

  I filled two cups at the rain barrel and we sipped water, watching the women and boys return with their bags of mussels from the mangrove. The boys stopped to look at us. I called Jesus to bring food.

  “Are you travelling alone, Mr Doblin?”

  Berman’s back was almost straight and his thick hair glistened like anthracite. He lit a cigarette. Stood, smoking, looking out. I couldn’t trust him, but felt like explaining that we were prisoners.

  “With my girlfriend . . . ”

  Jesus returned with plates of rice and coconut and sugar cane. He and Berman did not react to each other. We sat down to eat.

  “You’re American,” he said at last.

  “Canadian,” I said.

  A slight smile. “We both have German names. We were once countrymen, yes? When will the manager be back?”

  “In a while. Always before dark.”

  After we’d eaten I fetched two bottles of cold beer from the cooler and he offered me a cigarette.

  “I’m with the university,” he said. “From the university. Mr Pedrarias is building a road and he disturbs some graves. What is disturbed interests us.” He picked up the clay whistle from the table. “Like this, Mr Doblin.”

  “It’s mine. I bought it.”

  “Is that right? Can you tell me, Mr Doblin, who you bought this from?”

  “A woman.”

  “And where did she get it?”

  “She said it came from the new road.”

  “The new road.”

  “From the cemetery near the new road.”

  “This is too old to come from the cemetery. What exactly are you are doing here?”

  “Waiting for the owner. We . . . I’m . . . ”

  “Ah, yes?” He sat upright, his boot tapping, impatient. “I don’t believe you understand your situation, Mr Doblin.” He swallowed the last of his beer, belched. “You know, that road will never be built now. These are important discoveries.” He caressed his bag, stretched out his legs. “I’m very tired, Mr Doblin. I find myself unable to stay awake. I would like to lie down somewhere.”

  On my cot I dreamed it was morning and Jesse and Sucre were tangled in the big hammock. But no. Berman was still asleep in the outside hammock, his heavy satchel nestled between his legs.

  I woke late in the afternoon. Berman was up and shaved, pacing the veranda. His boots, beside the water barrel, were spotless and sparkling.

  “Perhaps you can point out the woman,” he said. “The woman who found the serpent piece.”

  “That one over there,” I said. “The woman with the baby.”

  He started down the steps, returned for his hat, then crossed the yard to the woman’s shack. She looked up at him as he approached her, using a finger to turn a strand of black hair behind her ear. She stepped inside her doorway and he stood outside, beating his hat against the side of his leg. I felt like a betrayer as I watched them talk. But perhaps she’d make more money, and I didn’t care really. It didn’t matter what happened here, only that Sucre finish his road and take us out. It didn’t matter what Berman or Sucre or Pedrarias did or did not do, what any of them intended to do. Berman pointed at me. The woman laughed and waved her hand toward the hill: to the new road, to the cemetery, to Jesse and Sucre. It started to rain. She shifted the child to her other arm and they both went inside the shack. The rain was cleaning the red off the steps. I tilted my face to the downpour. I’d stay outside till I was soaked, outside in the mud and rain. Rain poured down the roof, shooting the overhang, churning the mud channel. Berman was the man who’d kissed Jesus the other night. I was certain of it. He just looked ordinary in daylight. He was wearing glasses, like a professor. But he wasn’t a professor. He was too greedy, lazy, and dangerous, powerful. Government, mining company, drug cartel. Strong enough, probably, to prevent Sucre from completing his road and keep Pedrarias from his new car. And if Sucre didn’t take Jesse dancing we’d never get out. Rain drenched me. Rain and fear and fever were the forces holding me together. What I wanted, beside the road through the jungle to be opened up, was deep and unknown and neither in the future not the past, and had to do with Jesse, Jesse Green. She couldn’t be measured in terms of flight or addiction, and interrogation had not spoiled her, nor had Sucre. Jesse was pure existence. She rode easy over the dead and didn’t hurt the living because she had given herself all away.

  It had stopped raining when Berman came out of the shack, though the trees were dripping. He was hatless and stood looking around the clearing. He started toward the house, then stopped. He walked a few paces to the corner of the woman’s little shack and, swaying in the sunlight, pissed against the clay wall. His penis was half-hard, curved like a shepherd’s crook. When he was done, he re-entered the hut. After a few minutes I heard the thin wail of a baby. The crying went on and on till the last clouds had rolled away and my shirt was almost dry again. When the tension left my body, I went through the house to the back and listened for the bulldozer’s engine.

  4.

  After the worst heat of the afternoon is over and before the evening insects have woken hungry, the fields are still and cattle come out of their shade to seek grass. These are sick-looking cows. They wade through black broken stalks that the salt has killed, past fenced crops, to a wall of corn. Fat green heads of corn. The corn paths lead through tall yellow-green stems. You must step carefully because of poisonous snakes and spiders. This rich atmosphere clothes you, toes to hat. The cows’ bony heads bob on the crest of vegetative waves that the rain has sculpted. Small animals, invisible from above, tunnel under the soil, make furrows along the dirt between the stems. Beyond the cornfield is pasture, then a sloping treeless plain, and crossing the plain is like drifting in a warm sea, through silken intermittent fog, not the drizzle of a Vancouver winter. This gentle passing surface rises toward convent ruins and jungle; at your feet pale yellow gives way to green to horizon blue. And if you slowly spin, closing your eyes, you can imagine yourself upside down, floating in space, head full of blood, a pillar between earth and heaven.

  I have found human paths everywhere. When I find one I follow it a while, as though I will discover a lost friend where there are no friends. Sucre says it’s late in the season. I’ve been doing this for days, and never tread the same path twice. The farm fields, the cornfield maze, the pasture. I brush seed and hay from my clothes, from my hair, and walk through the f
ly-thick cattle till I reach, on a small hill, the shade of the convent ruins where the cows like to lie down in the evening. Each tiny room, defined now by no more than crumbling walls, has its own garden of wild flowers growing among the fallen stones. Sister. Sister. Sister. Sister. From this place you can see the cemetery, the tops of the village houses, the estate shacks, the manager’s house, even the big villa off by itself with its sapphire pool overlooking the bay. You can see the torn earth of the new road winding out of sight to the port. All this belongs to Pedrarias. But not the ocean beyond the mangroves stretched like a glass sheet, dotted with deep-sea traffic. Not the lighthouse on a distant rock flashing in time to my heartbeat. You cannot see — but I feel it — the other ocean, the opposite sea, the wilder one on the other side of the isthmus, the one that when it meets its counterpart is calmed in the locks of the canal.

  The nuns here, before the canal, before the wars, barely felt the world lapping at their walls. I kneel in a corner of one of their cells and a black jet flies over, tearing the air. Magda was the last sister and perhaps this was her room. I pray to Magda to tell me what to do. Parrots answer.