Damn, it was cold! It was early summer and I had just spent a soggy night in a leaky tent. I had pitched it on the railroad right of way next to some grazing cows. At about two AM, I was startled out of my skin by the piercing headlight of a freight. It was so intense, I felt it. The whistle blew right as it got level with my tent. That was it for the night. I was soaked anyway, so I packed up and grumbled on down the road to warm up.
A few miles out of Pritchard, B. C. I started to feel better. Eventually the sun came up and burned off the chill. My spirits picked up and so did the traffic. This was day two on my journey to Africa and I was looking for a good one. As if my thoughts had been read, a green Chevy Nova pulled up to a stop just yards ahead. This meant they had intended to stop after seeing me. The ones who weren't sure came to stops much farther ahead.
My best friend in Texas had the same vehicle and we had driven it from Vancouver to Houston only a couple of years before. I had warm memories from that trip and seeing a similar machine brought them back to the surface. Just enough so, that they over-rode the fact that this car had no license plates. I had noticed it right away, but instantly put it in the back of my mind as being of no importance. I wanted to ride in that green Chevy Nova.
There were two fellows in the front seat and they said they were going to Calgary. I said it would get me over the Rockies, so I’d be happy to ride with them. I tossed my pack in the back seat and hopped in. There was a beat up alligator suitcase on the floor and two cheap sets of business clothes carefully hung on the hook above the window. The guys were twenty-somethings and spoke with the gentle downy feathered drawl of Alberta. They were wearing jeans and Western shirts. The driver was apparently older and far less talkative than his sidekick.
I lit a smoke of some homegrown weed that my brother-in-law had given me as a parting gift. It was sweet, mild and less intoxicating than a Spring meadow. We shared it as we sped onward towards the mountain pass over the Rockies. The countryside grew exponentially more beautiful. I had never been over this ground before and was I increasingly enchanted with every single mile. Gordon Lightfoot’s voice came over the radio singing, Alberta Bound. It was cookie-cutter perfect. Too perfect, as a matter of fact.
“That is the shittiest weed I ever smoked,” said the man at the wheel.
“Yeah, keep that crap for yourself, you stupid son-of-a-bitch,” said the other.
I decided to ignore their breach of good manners and enjoy the scenery in spite of it.
More time passed and the two guys got less chatty. I figured that they must have been on the road a long time and were jaded with the trip back. I was very tired but enthralled with the topography. The most magisterial mountains I had ever beheld stood all around. So tall, I had to crane my neck to see the tops of the smaller peaks out the window. The changing sunlight made some of the glaciers look like different colours of sherbet. The layering of differing minerals had formed rock rainbows. It was an obviously special place and I was in justified awe.
We began the climb the foothills and gain altitude. Signs occasionally warned of wolves, bears, moose, cougars and reminded one not to litter. We were in a remote region and I was in heaven because of it. About that time in the journey the two fellows started looking back and forth at each other. This went on for a few miles without a word being said. Eventually, the driver turned his head slightly and asked me if I had a driver's license. I assured him that I did.
The younger man turned right around in his seat to face me and said with a malignant grin, “Good! If we get stopped by the cops today, you're driving. We stole this car, ass-hole. Killed the owner. Dumped his fuckin’ ass in the bush. Got it, motherfucker?”
His Alberta accent was gone like alcohol evaporating off a cotton swab. Although adept at targeting accents of all kinds, I couldn't pinpoint his but I could place it much further South. For the first time during the ride, I noticed every crooked mottled tooth in his rat-like smile. The driver was intently screening his rear-view mirror during this announcement to catch my reaction. He got nothing visible.
My awareness, at that instant, was back in time, focused on an old man that I had met on a Greyhound bus trip late one hot humid night in Beaumont, Texas. He had packed around the exact same scuffed brown alligator suitcase as these two men. He had asked me to join forces with him because he needed a younger man (I was in my teens) to help him in his business, which was armed robbery. His sidekick had just been arrested the week before.
His bailiwick was small jobs like gas stations, motels and small town banks. He'd been at it for most of his life and he promised to teach me everything needful to know. I remember a spiritual stink that haloed him as we drew our luggage from the bus compartment and he tugged a big dirty wad of ill-gotten cash out of his pocket to show me as proof and flashed the butt of a pistol jammed in his trousers behind his dusty black sport coat.
My memory then moved further back in time to my father playing cribbage with some of his associates in Louisiana. There was a long-haired old man who was my favourite when I was a young child. I used to sit in his lap to watch the card games. He had white hair and a soft voice. He used to pull nickels and dimes out from behind my ear and then give them to me. The guys all had pistols strapped to shoulder holsters. One day, I told my father that I really liked that old guy, Abe.
My father said, “You do, eh? Guess what he does for a living?”
I said I couldn't possibly guess.
“He kills people. Mike. He's a hit-man,” said my father.
That memory bled into another one that occurred around the same time. I was riding my Stingray banana-seat bike to Carlino’s Store to buy comic books and candy bars. I was about nine years old and living in Baton Rouge. I was riding along a concrete-lined bayou next to a big chain-link fence. A large boulevard ran parallel to my left. I saw a three foot long, perfectly intact snake skeleton laced through the fence and I stopped immediately to investigate. The sun had bleached it white as snow and it was brittle.
After determining that it couldn't be removed without breaking it, I pondered the feasibility of reassembling it with glue. I heard a loud sharp, screech of brakes on the boulevard. I whipped my head around to see if I was going to be hit by a car. I saw two cars. One had pulled in front of the other and diagonally cut it off. It was a big black car. The other car was smaller and the lighter colour made no impression on me. They both came to rest just ahead of me.
What did make an impression on me was when two men in nice clean black suits and white shirts flew out of the big car and ran to the driver's side of the smaller car. They jerked the door open, hauled the driver out by his neck-tie and bent him over upside down for about one minute. They walked fast back to their car carrying something in a pocket handkerchief. One man looked at me as if he was going to speak and then changed his mind. They burned rubber down the boulevard. I saw lots of blood and globs of spit on the hot pavement after the man in the smaller car righted himself and took off. The horrid drama had happened in the time it takes to tie your shoe.
Those true memories, having informed the moment I was in, now made me very angry. I had broken my camp in a rush that morning and hadn't strapped on my knife. It was still in my pack. I sat silently with my eyes pointed directly at the rear-view mirror. I opened two channels into my soul. One connected to a battlefield in Tyler, Texas and one to a beach in England where a dragon ship was beached. I softly unzipped my pack and put the blade out of sight but in easy reach.
Before the trip, I had put my life savings in a little film canister on a wire around my neck and had vowed it wouldn't be removed if I yet breathed. The car sped on. I bored holes in the rear-view. It was a good day to die and a beautiful place.
The driver said, “We're going to rob your ass up ahead, you piece of shit.”
The other fellow cackled. Calculations went forward rapidly in my mind. A question and answer period with considered contingencies for each possibility. Did they have a pistol or maybe two? Did they have a rifle in the trunk? Would they frog-march me out to the trees?
There was a slim chance of getting control of both of them, but that scenario needed me to act first. The vehicle was moving fast and I didn't relish the thought of a crash in grizzly country. At any rate, I hadn't seen any weapons yet and the guys might have been practical jokers but when you are walking in snake country, the fact that you haven't see one yet is no reason to let down your guard. I take people at their word. In this, I am not alone. Nor is it a fault. It is simply a less prevalent way of being. Try to imagine a world where people say what they actually mean. Wow.
The driver and his side-kick bragged about crimes that they had or hadn't committed. The truth was a fifty-fifty shot given the variety of deeds mentioned and my own prior experiences with violent humans. Every time the eyes of the driver glanced up at the rear-view, they were met by mine. I spoke no other word after saying that I possessed a driver's license.
The ugly minutes wore on until the pair got quiet. The driver kept looking every few seconds into my eyes. I sat dead centre directly behind his mirror. Eventually, I felt the tide change. Fear was now sniffing at the ankles of those two. I stared straight ahead and did not speak. We happened upon a rest stop, way up near the mountain pass. There were a few cars pulled over and a variety of people and pets milling around. There were some vending machines. The perfect place to escape. Our car pulled in and stopped.
The driver said, “Uh, we were just joking, man. You wanna Coke?”
“Nope.”
“You wanna get out?”
“Nope.”
Sidekick went out and bought a few bags of chips and some drinks. I stayed in the Chevy locking eyes with the driver in the mirror. The younger man returned and dropped a few bags of potato chips on the front seat. He got in and tried to offer me one. I just stared in the rear-view at the drivers slightly wider eyes. We resumed our uncomfortable journey.
Soon we were running downhill. My ears popped with the decrease in altitude. None of us three had spoken since the rest stop. Before long, the prairie lay spread out in front of us like a Whitmanesque table-cloth, so vast that secrets were safe, even out in the open. The driver drove into Calgary. It was getting twilight. He tried to engage his partner in small talk. It didn’t work. Every time he looked into his rear-view mirror our eyes met. Sidekick started to fidget in his seat and appeared to be under some measurable stress. I was offered a drop-off anywhere in Calgary that I chose.
“Not in town. Outside the city limits.”
I was driven to a nice little place called Eagle Lake, some miles East of town. Far easier for me to hitch-hike from in the morning. Those guys seemed mighty relieved to be rid of me. Their car u-turned and I watched its tail lights diminish Westwards back to Calgary. I made a fire, cooked some soup and bunked down for the night. I pitied those two, whether they were legit bad men or only yokels on a day pass. Some things are just not funny.
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