Vandal Love (32 page)

A wind strove and faded and picked up again. A few strands of cranky music sounded from the nearby hotel, something like overturned trash cans, a live band tonight.

So what are you planning? François asked.

Sat Puja admitted he wasn’t sure but did so in that
practised deep, wise-sounding voice, as if this was just a business decision to be made. I’m in love, he added, trying this on. He described Juanita, that she was pregnant and that he wanted to give her a good life.

Pregnant, François said and smiled.

It’s not mine.

Oh … I see. But she’s in agreement.

I haven’t talked to her yet.

About this?

No, at all, Sat Puja admitted.

François furrowed his brow but agreed that this was just a detail. I’ve been through similar situations, he said. It’s not easy.

Having shared with his father that he was in love, Sat Puja felt noble.

Listen, François finally told him. I may be dying.

Sat Puja’s thoughts fled with his breath. He couldn’t see it, his father dressed so young. François explained, and Sat Puja tried to make his lungs work. He wanted to be brave, matter-of-fact, like his father. He thought of everything he’d learned, meditations and prayers, but it all suddenly seemed silly. What his father had told him felt impossibly private. It demanded silence. Sat Puja’s eyes filled with tears.

You’re sure?

Yes. Actually. There’s no doubt about it.

Some unnamed bird called and wheeled in the cooling metal of the sky. Land stretched, folded on distance. Wind, after the heat of day, was as if there had been no wind before. There were the hidden fragrances
of night, the cool of a dry summer evening, the quiet of dark divides.

This is a good place, François told him.

The remaining sunlight had turned the world golden.

Within this quiet they heard concerned voices, sandals slapping tiles as a young woman in white ran along the ashram path. Others had gathered in doors, one man with a warrior’s turban holding a cell phone and shaking his head, his hand covering his mouth as he spoke. He was staring at Sat Puja and François.

Sat Puja, the young woman said. Jamgoti’s dead. The police just called. They want you to stay here. They’re going to want to talk to you.

Already four dark cars were filing into the parking lot. Two men climbed from each. For a moment they stood there, eight big shadows, like pictures of moose in police uniforms Sat Puja had once seen. He expected them to come charging on all fours. He could barely breathe.

When François looked at him, it was with eyes that knew everything. He whipped off his money belt and pushed it into Sat Puja’s hands.

Run, he said and grabbed his elbow and hauled him up.

They stumbled down the hills from the ashram, caught in the thrill of fear and complicity and love. François waved his arms to create a diversion, shouting Run! as he split off, parallel to the police, who now stomped along beside him.

Junipers rose from shadow. Footpaths crossed naked stone. François’s feet glided on the brittle earth. He knew
this decision was perhaps among his worst, but he’d felt too full of love. He whooped with joy. Though his son might be innocent, he was better off guilty.

The police were above him, running fast with choppy strides, when François stopped to dance around in the dirt. He held his arms out like those of a drunken master imitating the crane. There would be no more false dreams, no frozen heads or new confused bodies grown centuries from now.

The police thought they had him, but he raced off with an ancient speed and soon disappeared.

That evening there was yet time for contemplation. The percussive rhythms of ranchera began at the hotel terrace as, at the ashram, a murmuring crowd of men and women in white robes gathered. They came out past the dead fountains and overgrown meditation gardens dating to their settlement’s first innocent days. They stood together before that dusty expanse of dissolving slopes and deep gullies. But there was nothing to see, only the dry, unnamed crags at sunset, the light resonating within silence.

François was the first to find the highway. A semi slowed, air hissing in the brakes. He ran to the door. The driver nodded and asked where he was going. North was all François said. He held himself still, jittery, trying to catch his breath. He considered what would be next.

He’d been sitting a while, the radio buzzing with lonesome tunes, when he glanced over. In the light of the dash, he noticed that the trucker was wearing a teddy beneath his T-shirt, the outlines of strained and sweaty lace showing through, frilly on the shoulders but heart-shaped where his belly met the steering wheel.

At first Sat Puja could hardly run. He stumbled, wanted to fall down and curl up, a high-pitched squealing coming involuntarily from his throat. He’d have been caught had François not made the diversion. Finally he’d controlled himself until he was only yipping and panting. Soon his robes turned brown and made for good camouflage. He still hoped to reach Juanita. He recalled how pride had lit his father’s face like a crystal. It felt like a shared secret. Though Sat Puja’s lungs were drawing into a searing knot, he commanded his body and made it run.

The dark world muscled, branches striking, cactuses at his shins like snakes. He had on the hip pouch with his passport and ID. He’d shoved the mail and money belt deeper into the pockets of his robe and was wheezing. An image came to him of Jamgoti crying beneath a violent sun, his reason having abandoned him at last, destroyed by so much light. Sat Puja had been innocent to think that anyone was strong enough to survive that. Within the knowledge of what he’d done was terrible calm. For the first time he had no choice but to be himself. What else was there? Just this life, to await rebirth, to live and be born again a little better.

In the distance, as if carried on the breeze, was the glow and hum of the highway. He could hardly breathe. He climbed towards it and fell against the steep incline. He scrambled up through the trash and dust until he reached the side of the pavement. His lungs froze. Veins throbbed in his temples. He lay there, unable to move, his body a strobe of adrenaline.

A passing truck slowed and stopped. A tarpaulin was tied to the metal posts of the sidewalls, and a few men crawled from underneath. They were small and dark. In Spanish they offered words of muted encouragement to each other. Two climbed off. They paused to tug at their dirty jeans, then bent to examine Sat Puja. They muttered and shrugged, then lifted him. The others came out and carried him back.

The truck started forward, the tarpaulin rippling. They took turns keeping the edges from flapping. Harvey felt his chest easing. The wind seemed a new air. The men watched him silently. Suffocation held him in a timeless lull. Then the first cough broke, and he twisted until his lungs pounded, his mouth open as if to cry. He lay on the uneven planks, aware of rushing, of nothing to hold to, the tarpaulin flapping like giant wings. He breathed, great breaths across those blind ranges, the engine battering beneath, the highway receding to far-off houselights against a dark outer rim, gasping.

The hardest years were those when Isabelle was still too young for nursery. Bart had to work the night shift in a drab motel to be with her, half-asleep during the day or later, at the counter with her basket as he napped, chin on his fist and poorly paid. When she was three, the dial of his brain had been set to nights and he got the same shift at the Conoco plant and left her at daycare, regretting every minute of it, relieved only when he discovered that she was the one eating other children’s food and snapping
toys with the audacity of a carnival strongman. She remained big for her age through elementary, and waiting for her after school he’d seen her knock boys down, freely distributing charley horses and snake burns. He’d feared for her grades, but her leanings had been determined by their time together, lying around reading novel after novel, quietly or to each other or flipping through the library’s stock of picture books until she said, Let’s do something else, and he asked, Do we have to? Even after-school detention did her no harm because she managed to finish her textbooks and skip a grade.

By junior high she was a jock and a brain, almost expelled for running a pair of stained underwear up the flagpole after having written the principal’s name on them, and kept in only because they couldn’t win the regional basketball tournament without her. Though Bart had worried that she would turn out lumbering and ugly like himself, she was lean enough, muscular with a pretty tanned face. In high school she was the youngest in her grade by two years, ready, he knew, for the cataclysm of love. She was fifteen, six foot three, the boy she chose six-eight, a cut-up, a quarterback, a grin like a pirate’s. Together they’d gone in the night to the high school of their regional contenders and spraypainted its name, Sacred Heart, and a few other words that the local papers declined to print but referred to as symbols of our national decay. Her aura of love wounded Bart so deeply that she saw and sat down with him and asked why he’d chosen to stay single all these years.

By then at the Conoco plant he’d been promoted from clean-up to general maintenance to pipefitting and finally, after a period of training, to foreman. When she’d been five he’d seen a cheap house on a list of foreclosures and had made a down payment. It was set off a quiet road, a stone’s throw from a narrow bayou and a marsh. That first day, while he was painting, she’d snuck around back, through the overgrown pasture, past the old barn to the bayou. From yellow water, gars surfaced into sunbeams, big fish with torpedo bodies and eyes like rubber plugs, their duck’s bills opening on floating insects. On the other side was a junkyard, the low trampled stretch near the shore heaped with tires and car seats, vacuum hoses and dashboards. Above the trees the sky was the colour of wet cotton. After her father this was her first love. For years, she would leave the house alone, go out past the shed and barn, in along the woods to where the roots were washed clean from years of rain and the dense, dark air smelled of mud.

Bart first tried to deter her, then simply kept the house stocked with insect repellent and bought her a hat with a protective screen like a mourning veil so that mosquitoes wouldn’t land on her face, though she never used it. At the bayou she asked her first questions of life. He’d explained that her mother had died in a car accident, and she had a photo of a woman near a lamppost, head tilted, each cheekbone as strong as the heel of a hand. Her hair was copper in the fading light, her lips pale. She’d mused each feature, even the grey street, which, with its few lettered storefronts and an old marquee,
seemed grateful. Later, when she’d become interested in genealogy, Bart had hooked up to the Internet for her.

Though she was never able to track down Bart’s father, she did manage to place Jude. She sent out photocopies of his driver’s licence, and a genealogist told her he thought the White name was false, once commonly used on fake IDs. Bart recalled that her grandfather had been a boxer, and searching the web, she’d found Jude White mentioned on a site that was the work of an aficionado. He’d compiled information on the lost great up-and-comers, boxers with undefeated records and unexplained disappearances. Who was Jude White? he wrote. The man who broke Leon Brown’s jaw and his own hand … The article mentioned facts from across the continent and that, before his last fight, Jude had filled out his release with Jude Hervé. Isabelle was off and running. The next connection, after extended work, was to a family in Québec, in Gaspésie, the birthdate the same, just three years off. From there she laboured as if rebuilding a lost history, discovering the name Hervé in out-of-the-way places, isolated occurrences like virulent outbreaks. And so she sent more letters. One day Bart gave her a discoloured package from a private investigation agency. It contained information on her grandmother and mentioned Jude White in connection with a child theft not two hours from where they lived. She had just started the search for this woman, sending out letters again, when she fell in love.

That fall and winter she went everywhere with her boyfriend on his motorcycle. They rode for simple
pleasure, following the interstate to where it lifted onto pillars above treetops and swamps, to New Orleans or the shacks on back roads where they ate platters of bright red crawfish and cooled their illegal hearts with beer. On the gapped planks of the loft they listened to hooting in the rafters. The highway was loud in the darkness. They went out and lay on the roof’s overhang, the tin panels still warm from the sun. After school, when she was a girl, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormon elders had talked to her of God, their suits soaked through with sweat and humidity right down to their strange undershirts. She imagined God as nothing more than a feeling—what she felt now, her fingertips at the inside of her arm, her hair in her eyes so that she could look at him.

When, one day, he told her of his desire to see the country, she understood and wanted to go too but rather on her own and to meet him somewhere. She imagined hitchhiking, sleeping in strange places, catching rides or taking buses across dusty plains, gradually becoming what she would be. That month had been cool, chill mist, rain thrashing windowpanes, and she walked the bayou often, pleased with sweet winter mud. She followed the path towards the windy rumble of the highway, the heavy turning of engines and wheels. She inhaled diesel exhaust, hot rubber and metal and grease. Rainbow blooms of oil moved in the ebb. She stared at the thin golden surface that made her think she was seeing deep until a gar lifted, barely moving from below, and she realized the murk went down and down.

Low clouds filled the highway sky. Rain found its way along her scalp, her throat and shoulders. Wind rattled the trees. Shoes sopping, she returned, the tall grass of the pasture matted into whorls like eddies on water. The living room looked dark in water-rippled light. She gathered a few things. At the mirror she waited for the storm to pass.