The Journey Prize Stories 24 (4 page)

“Shut that door behind you,” he called back without turning around. “And make sure it shuts. That mangy farm dog got in there one night and Mum lost her damn mind.”

Matthew came out with his shirt half on and he was still wet from the shower. When he pulled the T-shirt down it darkened in patches, sitting ridged and crooked across his heavy chest.
He left it like that and pulled the door shut as he came out. He took a step and then stopped and went back. He gave the door a shove. It came open so he leaned back inside and grabbed the knob and pulled as hard as he could. This time he heard the metal latch click. The door stayed put when he shoved it again.

“That door’s a piece of shit,” he said, coming down the steps in ragged old skateboard shoes. When he got down to the gravel he trod heavy on the rocks and they shot out as he walked past Paul to the passenger side of the car. Matthew tried to open the door and it wouldn’t give. He stared down at the handle and muttered something, his hand still trying it. His fingers kept going even when he knew the door was locked and finally he stopped and put both arms on top of the roof. Inside of a second he yanked them clear and cursed a string of nonsense at the car and the heat and the world altogether.

“It’s hot as absolute hell out here,” Matthew said. “This car is going to be a billion fucking degrees inside.”

Paul nodded and spat on the ground. The phlegm was thin and parts of it started to vanish right away on the stone. He exhaled hard and went over to the car and stood facing his brother, both of them the same height, Matthew much larger in build. They had the same eyes though, the same hairline. They had the same shape of mouth and sometimes made the same expressions on very different faces, Paul’s thinner face with its squared jaw and Matthew’s rounded face with a rounded jaw and that thick, wide-set neck below it. They looked at each other for a while. Paul’s eyes were clear, though they skittered around. Matthew’s eyes, bloodshot from the drink, were still as the burnt and breezeless world around them.

“Was Mum outraged last night?” Matthew said.

“She didn’t say one way or the other,” Paul said, “but I guess you probably could have come back here first to drop your shit off. Instead of straight from the airport to the bottle.”

“I know. I should’ve.”

“I talked her down though, before she took off for work. Told her you’d be back to the house this morning to go with me an’ that you’d see her tonight. I also told her your future wife was likely at the party. That you might shack up with some townie and quit your fuckin’ philandering.”

Matthew stood there with his mouth partly open. He blinked hard and his eyelids were out of sync. Paul started laughing at him.

“You’re still plastered, you idiot.”

Little laughs came out of Matthew’s maw for a few seconds, and then he inhaled hard and stood up straight. “You should’ve come out last night.”

“I’d say I’m sort of way past partied out. It’s not so bad when you just come back home for a little while and cause some shit. But when you live here you’d rather punch yourself in the dick than go out with those idiots.”

“You just didn’t go ’cause you couldn’t have driven today. You’d be in bed ’til five with your hangover.”

“I have to drive ’cause your licence is suspended.”

“It’s suspended ’cause I was driving your uninsured fuckin’ car when you were too hungover.”

Paul looked at Matthew for a second and then turned away. He nodded. When he turned back he had a crooked little smile on his face. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “We’ll sort that out too.”

Paul put the key in the lock and turned it, then opened the door. The heat inside swarmed him. He made a funny sound and
hit the button to unlock all the doors. Matthew still couldn’t get in.

“Stop fuckin’ pulling on it,” Paul said.

This time when he hit the button Matthew’s door unlocked, and he opened it. Matthew leaned back from the car when he felt the air and then he took a deep breath. He looked over at Paul and they shook their heads and got in. Paul put the key in the ignition and turned it, and they wound down their windows before shutting the doors.

“I don’t care about losin’ the licence,” Matthew said. “I don’t even have a car.”

Paul looked over at him and nodded. Then he turned the radio on.

“Yeah, but you might have one someday,” Paul said.

“Fuck it. I ride the bus. I’m gonna get a bike maybe.”

Paul smiled. “Man, you’ll die riding a bike in that city.”

“I don’t die doing anything,” Matthew said. “And it sure as fuck wouldn’t be in that city.” He let out a short, loud laugh.

Paul fished a bottle of water out of a cooler in the back seat and drank deep. Matthew waited for him to pass it over, and all the while he stared through the front windshield at the house they’d grown up in. The narrow two-storey farmhouse stood at the head of the driveway, simple and ancient. If it had not been handed down to their family with the outlying fields and firs they would have had little at all. Not ten years ago those boys had set down to eat a mess of bacon and eggs and fried steak in the damp, stone-walled kitchen, their parents gone for the night. The greasy plates had just hit the suds in the sink when a black sedan rolled into the driveway carrying five men, all of them bent on laying Matthew out and stomping
him bloody into the gravel. Paul racked rock salt shells into an old double-barrel scattergun and went out to meet them. By the time he came back inside Matthew had soaked a rag through with spirit, jammed it into the bottleneck, and was trying to spark it with a barbeque lighter. Paul wrestled the bottle from his brother and cursed him out until Matthew sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands. He was sixteen years old. Paul was just two years older. Later that night they drank the bottle dry, sitting together in the dark waiting for the men to locate their guts and come back. They never did.

“You miss that house?” Paul said.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to believe I lived in it.”

“What’s it like out there where you live?”

“Like Mars.”

“You gonna ever come back east?”

“I think so.”

“When?”

“As soon as I made enough money to live off the bullshit wages back here. Or as soon as they start throwin’ money at people with grade twelve who can dig the hell out of a pipeline ditch.”

Paul smiled. Matthew turned to face him.

“You could live with me when I move back,” he said. “Get a cheap place somewhere in a town that ain’t this one.”

“I like it here.”

“Nobody likes it here. Not anybody smart as you.”

Paul shrugged.

“In a world that wasn’t so fuckin’ silly,” Matthew said, “I’d be able to stomach being here while you took another run at
that college. Even with no money and old enemies gettin’ fat just down the road.”

Paul nodded but he didn’t say anything. Matthew shifted in his seat. He spat out of the window and hung his head.

“Truth be told, man, this place makes my fuckin’ skin crawl. I don’t feel right until I get ten miles past the township line.”

Paul backhanded sweat from his brow, wiped his hand on the seat cover.

“This place wasn’t ever kind to you,” he said.

Pointing west, Matthew said, “Out there I do okay. I ain’t shit in this town.”

“You are right now. Trust me.”

Matthew shook his head.

“Of all the days to be here,” Paul said, “this is the one.”

He fiddled with some of the levers and knobs on the console. Then he gave the dashboard a whack with his right hand and the air conditioning came on.

“Yes,” Matthew said.

“You want to get out and wait until it cools down?” Paul said.

Matthew looked at him and then looked past him out of the driver-side window at the fields of high grass, the hazy outline of pine trees rising from the slope of the mountains to the north.

“No,” he said. “Let’s get going. He’ll be waiting for us to get there. I don’t want him to have to wait.”

Paul nodded and put his seatbelt on. Matthew sat back in his seat and shifted some more. He pulled at his shirt and seemed to make it more crooked by trying to fix it. Paul studied his brother for a few seconds, then put the car into gear.

“Okay,” he said.

—

They drove along the single-lane county roads to avoid the traffic, the tourists, and the travellers. They passed farms with empty fields and others with crops of corn and soy, new metal silos lit up by the sunlight and old wooden barns gone to rot. They saw very little cattle. There were horses grazing close to the road on one property, one head sticking out through the wire of the perimeter fence, the ears flicking. Soon the car followed the rear boundary of another field. This time the fencing was reinforced by wooden slats, and there were some high sheet-metal walls with barbed wire running along the top. Way off in the distance the field went up a hillside and there were strange shapes moving out there, creatures that were too tall or ran on two long legs, and some with horns that no animal from that part of the world should have. Matthew mouthed a profanity and squinted as he tried to figure out what he was watching out of his window. Suddenly he started nodding and turned to his brother. They had gone there as children. Paul had been old enough to walk the grounds with his father, and he’d recognized the place right away. Matthew frowned at him and turned back. They observed a battered wooden sign with something like a tiger’s head painted on it. “Elmvale Jungle Zoo,” it said. Matthew watched the sign go by and shook his head as it went.

“That place is retarded.”

“Remember when that tiger got out and went into the town and the cops came in and shot it before anyone could get to it with the tranquilizer gun?”

“No,” Matthew said.

“Man, I do.”

Matthew wouldn’t stop shaking his head. When they had long since cut through the township he still had a troubled
look on his face. Paul knew his brother wasn’t fretting that hard about the ramshackle zoo. He waited and soon enough Matthew spoke up.

“How has she been without him there?” he said.

Paul held the wheel in one hand and ran the other through his hair. He wiped a palmful of sweat on his shirt sleeve.

“You know, you take for granted the kind of feelings they got for each other, forget they been through shit that would kill most folks,” Paul said. “Then you see one of them without the other … Shit.”

“Yeah.”

Paul bit at his nails, then put his free hand back on the wheel. “She goes to work and she fusses around the house and gets on with it, but there’s nothing behind it. All those old routines don’t mean shit anymore. They just pass the time.”

“What about when he was home?”

“Before, when he was there between the treatments, he wasn’t really himself. They put you under and hit you with that juice and it saps the life right outta you. He came home worn out. Couldn’t remember a lot of things. It was weird. So this last time he asked just to stay in there until it was done.”

Matthew leaned back in his seat and set his arm on the window ledge. His skin stuck to the plastic. Then he too wiped his brow with his T-shirt. He coughed and had to roll down the window to spit. A torrent of warm air came in at them. Matthew shut his eyes and took a deep breath.

“You might as well leave that open,” Paul said. “This air conditioner hasn’t done shit for us in its life.”

Paul also put his window down and they drove for a long time with nothing but the sound of the rushing wind and the
low wail of the radio through the car speakers. Paul thought Matthew had gone to sleep until his brother sat up straighter in his seat and wound his window halfway up and sat there scratching his head. Paul rolled his window partway up as well.

“How do those things work? Those treatments?” Matthew said.

“They send a current through your brain to make you seizure.”

“Does it hurt him?”

“You’re out when they do it. They say you don’t feel it. But the anaesthetic does a number on you. And like I said, you forget shit for a while and you wake up without that fucking awful shit on your mind. That’s why epileptics don’t get depressed. Their brain hits a point and just says no more and they seizure. Nobody knows for sure how it works.”

Matthew took a deep breath and let it out slow. He rubbed at his eyes with the palms of his hands, leaned forward and crossed his arms on the dashboard. Then he rested his chin against them. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Anything with the brain freaks me out. I might rather be depressed than risk it. But you’re closer to it than I am. I don’t know.”

Paul stared out at the open road. The greying tarmac ran straight for miles and miles and shimmered under the blazing sun, and far off on the horizon a fog of humid heat obscured the country ahead. Not one cloud was above them, and he knew they were still far inland and had a long way to go. “I’d rather have seizures,” he said.

Matthew raised his head and stared at Paul for a while, but Paul didn’t look back.

—

In the early afternoon they pulled into a gas station at the edge of town. There were only two pumps and one of them only ran diesel for the tractors and trucks that came through. The station sat in the bottom of a valley where a dozen houses had been built maybe a century ago and half were boarded up or left to slow decay whether people lived in them anymore or not. The two-digit sign that stood high above the lot couldn’t keep up with the price of gas, and so now it just read double-zero, the going rate guessed at by those passing through. Paul pulled in from the road and came up to the pump and stopped.

“We runnin’ low?” Matthew said.

“I missed a turn somewhere a ways back,” Paul said. “I’m gonna ask somebody how to go straight from here, and yeah, we could use some gas too.”

Matthew sat up straight. He rubbed at his face and exhaled hard. Then he opened his door. “You pump, I’ll pay,” he said.

“Okay.”

Matthew went toward the gas station store, his arms stretched out wide, the back of his shirt dark with sweat. Paul waited a second and then got out of the car. He walked around it and stretched his arms as well, blinking under the open sky where the sun sat lonely and ruthless. He took the nozzle out of the pump and flipped the metal switch so that the gas would flow. Then he pulled the nozzle to the rear of the car, the hose tethered to the pump by a line with a rusted metal coil at the end. The gas tank’s cap had been lost for years, so he just opened the flap, shoved the nozzle into the hole, and squeezed. He thought of something and turned in time to see Matthew open the front door of the station before stepping in.