Whirl Away (5 page)

When he went back for another load of groceries a week or two later, neither April nor Dennis mentioned the movie date they'd missed, and Dennis stared out through the big front window without looking at April as she filled the bags, as if they'd both come to the conclusion that the idea had been a bad one they'd agreed to forget about.

Once the grip of the prairie winter let go, his horizons expanded beyond the narrow trails he beat through the dry snow—trails he would often have to break out every single morning after the night wind had filled them in. When the snow rotted and shrank—faster where the wind had mixed
in dark stains of fugitive soil—Dennis would watch his world expand with every single day of melt.

He had his pickup and the mobile home at the back of the park, and his hours were pretty much his own. Once the day was finished, he could pile into the truck and head into Calgary if he liked, or go out on the dusty roads through the farmland and scrub. He could head through the reserves towards the mountains, or just park his truck near the highway where the huge drifts of grey rock were thrown like tongues licking out from the fast mountain brooks that disappeared as soon as summer really arrived.

As it got drier, Dennis imagined that the dust trails behind the truck stood out like arrows, highlighting the roads behind and pointing directly at him, so that anyone who cared to look might find him at the very apex of the cloudy triangle, racing away frantically like a shiny armoured beetle. The drier the summer roads got, the higher the dust rose—and the more work there was to be done as rides ran full out and their parts wore out and failed, to the point that it seemed it might never end. The dustier it got, the more deceptive the prairie became, as if it too might never really end, as if each turn and twist simply led to more turns, each straight line to its own unreachable vanishing point.

Driving back to the park, there would just be the prairie, starting its gradual roll towards the foothills, and next, the top of The Thunder would rise over the hilltops, and the park would suddenly be there, poking up out of the ground like some unlikely industrial island. On more than one summer evening, he'd been at the top of The Thunder, doing
the inspection and watching how, just before twilight, the prairie looked for a moment as if it had all turned to water, shimmering in the weakening light. It made McNally's Fair seem even more like an island, he thought, or maybe, now that the roller coaster was half painted, like a ship, with the huge sheets of plastic flapping in the wind like untended sails.

From high in the scaffolding, brush hanging over the paint can, Dennis saw Michaela coming out of the family's trailer. Something about the girl had changed over the winter, he thought. She'd always been pretty, but now Dennis couldn't help but watch the woman as she headed for the office, unaware of his stare.

Michaela was Reinhoudt's only child. Reinhoudt told Dennis he had been hoping for a boy, and that they'd already had a name picked out: Michael. Never one to waste anything, Reinhoudt had added an
a
.

Every summer, the Reinhoudts brought Michaela with them. She'd stay in the city with relatives until the school year was over, and then she'd appear at the park, filling different jobs: taking tickets, then working the canteen, her forearms specked with small scars from dropping the french-fry baskets into the hot grease. When she started taking commerce at university, she took over the big wooden desk in the office trailer, doing the accounts for the whole operation.

The woman now in the office was a big change from the angry teenager who had sat in the front of The Thunder on one of Dennis's late night test drives because they were sharing
a smoke, the red coal at its tip bright from the wind, when Reinhoudt trundled into view below them. She'd muttered “Shit!” urgently under her breath, ducking down out of sight, and Dennis could still remember the heat of her breath that night, warm and damp against the outside of his elbow. She was angry a lot then, especially with her father, and Dennis used to keep her cigarettes for her and listen when she trashed her father for everything from his strict rules to his disdain for any boy who came to pick her up for a high school dance.

Dennis could see the silver roof of the administration trailer from the scaffolding, and he imagined that he could look right through the flat metal. He knew the office well enough; he picked his pay up from Michaela every Thursday, and he even had a key to the trailer in the off-season, so that he could get into the filing cabinet for purchase orders when he needed spare parts. There was a slatted swivel chair in the office, and he could imagine Michaela in there, head down and looking at papers. He couldn't decide whether her legs were stretched out under the desk and crossed at the ankles or if she sat with one leg drawn up underneath her. The thought nagged at him a little as he worked, as if he had a picture almost completely drawn up but some critical part was still smudged and unfinished. He could draw up everything else in his head: the big farming equipment calendar that Reinhoudt received every year—a mailing-list mistake, with a label that always read “McNally's Farm,” but Reinhoudt wouldn't return it because it was free; the piles
of invoices; and a big oily pin that had sheared off the main linkage in the Ferris wheel, which Reinhoudt was trying to get the manufacturer to take responsibility for.

But he could picture Michaela best of all.

She had a narrow, thoughtful face, and it seemed to Dennis that it was always turned down, so that she seemed to be looking somewhere close to your right bicep—a slow, curving smile and dark, peaked eyebrows. Reinhoudt was florid and blond, with a wide, flat, expressive face. Often, Dennis couldn't finish a sentence without knowing exactly what his boss's response was going to be. Michaela's mother's name was Anna, but the woman was so mousy and quiet that Dennis could hardly imagine she had anything to do with her daughter's features; it was as if even her genes had been too shy to contribute.

He thought about Michaela a lot while he worked on the scaffolding. He thought about what her world must be like, about how soft her long dark hair must be. Sometimes, about how a towel must feel against her skin when she was getting out of the shower, but he always tried to shake that thought out of his head.

It was cruel to bring a young woman like Michaela out here where she was stuck almost all by herself, Dennis thought, looking down at the Reinhoudts' travel trailer. The trailer came out from Calgary at the end of April. Dennis heard they had a big house in one of the newer Calgary suburbs, one with a fancy name like Tuscany or The Hamptons. He'd never seen it. Hard to imagine giving that up to rough it in a travel trailer five months of the year, Dennis
thought, and he'd said as much to Reinhoudt. Reinhoudt told him, “You don't run a good business from fifty miles away.”

The words had stopped Dennis in his tracks. He'd been halfway towards saying, “That's not the only thing you don't do from fifty miles away.” And for a moment he'd remembered his wife's face, but then it was gone.

Unlucky in love, that's how Dennis started thinking about himself, remembering his last sexual encounter, a front-seat blow job on a dirt road near Regina from a hitchhiker he'd picked up as he raced across the flatlands, wondering when they would ever end. She'd briefly replaced the empty coffee cups in the front seat and was, he thought, someone who had picked him simply because there wasn't anyone else in the truck to pick, and he wondered if that didn't actually match the run of the rest of his life.

The summer after Heather told him not to bother coming back, he spent a lot of time driving, often stopping to watch when a freight train came thumping along the rails next to the road, counting the cars and reading the different railroad names on their sides. Pulling over when he saw small hawks cutting shrinking circles in the sky. Eventually, what had seemed like home out east came to feel more like a healed fracture than anything else. Sometimes, when the weather changed, he would feel a deep, twinging pain for a little while. But there was always Aspirin in the cabinet in the bathroom and rye in the kitchen cabinet with the plates, and it didn't take much to shove it all away, once he had dinner in front of him and the television on.

Finally, the high first arc of The Thunder was completely painted, the scaffolding all moved to the next curve, and Dennis suddenly took Michaela in his arms as she came out the office. As he did, the lights all started coming on, and he could picture short, portly Reinhoudt at the heavy switches, bracing his feet and grunting, pushing up.

Dennis wrapped his arms around Michaela, reaching all the way around the slim woman's back so that he could hold on to his own elbows behind her, just after the sun had swollen up huge and had bent down into the clouds on the horizon. Just a quick hug was all, he thought, and she was so thin and soft and quiet there in his arms. He'd had a few shots of rye up on the scaffold, and it had started to make sense in his head. He'd known her for years, and she'd always been nice to him, made him feel as if he actually belonged there. And now it was as if she belonged here, notched in against him, like they fit together. The quick, copper-mouthed daring of it, like taking a chance working alone on the top of the roller coaster's first arc, no safety harness, only trust in balance.

“We could go out,” he whispered into her hair. “We could go into Calgary, maybe dancing. Catch a movie in town. Maybe just drive around out here to where we could see the stars better.”

But she broke out of his embrace, her face frantic, as if she was frightened. He felt suddenly guilty and looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else, and he remembered how smooth the side of her face was against his own, how pale her skin was compared to his own burnt arms.

Once she had pushed him away, she squared her shoulders and looked at him.

“Look,” she said, and then stopped.

And he knew she was Reinhoudt through and through after all. Her father had exactly the same way of throwing out single words as if they were meant to define everything—one word that set the scene and made the rules for everything that was to follow.

“Look, Dennis. I don't know what you're thinking, but I'll tell you this.” And then her chin came up and her eyes were coal-black under the brightening arc lights staring down onto them from above. “You've worked for Da for a long time, so I'm not going to say anything to him about this. But I'm not going out with you—I'm not going to Calgary with you, not going in the truck with you. Not if you were the last guy on the planet. It's just not going to happen.” While she was talking, she was stepping backwards, and sliding her hands one after the other down her arms towards the opposite wrist, as if she were wiping off something unpleasant that had gathered on the fine hair of her forearms.

At least, that was the way it seemed to Dennis—and even as she kept talking, he couldn't shake the image from his mind. He knew she was still talking, but the words seemed to be missing his ears. Then she stopped and turned, striding away, leaving a brightly lit Dennis standing at the centre of the park.

One of the big sodium lights blew then with a dull thump, throwing a circle of dark all around him, and in his head, Dennis was already going to get the big ladder and a spare
bulb, wrapped in its nest of corrugated cardboard. You have to be careful with the big bulbs, he knew. A touch in the wrong place and you could immediately mark the new bulb for failure: the small whorls of oil from just one fingerprint could make the quartz glass heat unevenly and crack. It said so right on the box. One errant touch and you'd ruined everything, you'd have to start all over again. Dennis headed towards the shed where the ladder was kept, and he could hear Reinhoudt nearby, swearing loudly; although the big bulbs lasted for ages, they were, according to Reinhoudt, unreasonably expensive.

Dennis looked up towards the horizon, towards the big, bright green arc of The Thunder, standing like some kind of rigid, unripened rainbow. He knew it didn't matter how many times The Thunder was painted and repainted, every time he rode in one of the cars, he could tell by the sway how much more the cross-members sagged. It was drooping even faster this year, bolts stripping somewhere, the first turn bottoming out deeper than it should—and even fifty coats of paint couldn't disguise that from him. He'd talked to Reinhoudt about getting someone to come in and look the ride over, someone who actually knew what they were doing, but he could tell right away that Reinhoudt wouldn't do it. He'd gotten a dismissive wave. “It'll be running fine after I'm dead and gone,” Reinhoudt said, almost shouting, “Nothin' wrong with The Thunder. Nothin' paint won't cure.”

The next morning, Dennis went back to painting, and thinking about Michaela.

He put the brush down across the top of the paint can and looked at the palm of his hand, where the green paint had bled through the bristles and had run down the handle onto his skin.

Funny how different it could look, he thought, just funny, the way the green paint made the hairs and pores and wrinkles stand out that much more when you looked close. He stretched his arms up above his head, and looked out across the flat of the prairie. You couldn't see the new grass if you looked directly at the ground, he thought, but if you looked across the whole prairie and let your eyes go, you could see the green fuzz of spring coming.

So high up, Dennis thought. So high up and so far down.

I
F THE ROOF LIGHTS
hadn't been on, I might have gotten away with it.

I might have been able to wiggle my way out of it somehow.

I might have been able to explain that I was transporting a dead body because no one else was available, just trying to help, that the victim had run out of time. They might have listened to that.