Year of Lesser (22 page)

“No sir.”

“Fine.” The teeth disappear and all Johnny can see now is a pudgy hand waving him on. He coaxes the Olds forward and regains the highway. “Let’s not do that again,” he says.

Melody asks for a cigarette. Her hands are shaking as she lights it.

“My father hated Americans,” Johnny says. “No real reason, just found them contrary and pushy. He refused to cross the border.”

Melody doesn’t answer. She’s staring out her window. She lights a second cigarette.

“You blaming anyone for this?” Johnny asks finally. Melody’s abrupt silence worries him.

She doesn’t answer. She concentrates on her cigarette, finishes, and
flips her butt out the window. There’s a gasp and a sucking noise as the glass slides down and up.

“No,” she says finally. “No one.” She hesitates and then adds, “It’s just a fact. Nobody to blame.”

“I drove Chris to school today,” Johnny says. “He told me you’d stopped talking to him.”

“What’s to say?”

“Okay,” Johnny answers.

It is only later, about an hour from Fargo, when they’ve stopped for a bathroom break and they’re sitting at a counter drinking coffee and a Coke, that Melody appears to exhale the breath she’s been holding for the last hour. She says, “Chris wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t know what to say. I remember, it was months ago, when we were just getting to know each other, and I was gaga. He’s so fine, I thought. But I don’t need
fine
right now. You see?”

Johnny nods. It is odd to be labelled in this backhanded way. What does Melody see in him, he wonders.

They both smoke then. These shared times with cigarettes have become both intimate and illicit, a devoted few moments making them equals, both deftly touching their ash into a common dish, the tips glowing, the smoke they exhale mingling and drifting upward: the love they feel for this thin cylinder. Better than drugs, Johnny thinks.

Melody laughs, her first real sign of spunk in a while. She says, “Yesterday I was sitting in my room and this wasp came out of nowhere. Buzzed around like it was lost. Circled my head, landed on my window, went bang bang against the glass. Should’ve still been hibernating, I figure, if that’s what wasps do, but somehow it got out of the hive and ended up in my room.” She stops. Puts her finger against her nose.

Johnny reaches out and touches her head. Runs his hand down her hair and then pats her back.

Johnny doesn’t know much about abortion. He has heard murmurings of a suction hose, like a miniature vacuum, yanking the fetus from the uterus wall. There is a pill you can take, he thinks, that aborts the baby. Scraping? He’s not sure. He’s never been terribly adamant one way or the other about abortion. He’s not big into rights and issues, though he does figure a woman’s got a right.

Johnny huddles in the waiting room of the clinic and reflects on the situation. Melody has already been ushered through the swinging door, on the arm of a crisp small black nurse with large calves. “My name’s Laverna,” she said, and offered Melody her hand. Johnny was ignored. He was a pariah of sorts, a dirty-deed man; necessary but filthy.

He wonders what they do with the fetuses. What they look like. If he feels any guilt, it has to do with the perception of other people. The people of Lesser. Inevitably, this escapade over the border will come to light and when it does both Melody and Johnny will suffer. Johnny especially, but that doesn’t concern him. There’s a fierce need in him to snub the zealots. In obvious ways the people of Lesser could ruin him, but he gives this little thought. He’s still buzzing. Listening for the voice of Melody. Wondering if she’ll cry out. He thinks he would have made an excellent soldier. Simply for the rush, the sense that death is close by, nipping behind him, not much to lose.

He steps outside and stands on the sidewalk and smokes. The clinic is located in a residential area, on the main floor of an older two-storey house with a wide outdoor porch. Everything about it is comforting. Like those hospices for AIDS patients Johnny saw on a documentary one night: cozy rooms in a homey atmosphere. Like coming home to Mom’s to die—or lose your baby. Perhaps we need to lie to ourselves, hide our garbage, our deaths, our sicknesses, Johnny surmises. He dislikes the falseness of it yet allows that he too finds solace in the belly of the building he has just exited.

In the car, driving through the middle of Grand Forks, Johnny had handed Melody the money. Five bills. Hundreds. A thin sheaf that she quickly pocketed, sliding her hand into the narrowness of her jeans
pocket, lifting a hip with a slight pelvic thrust that Johnny registered in the recesses of his mind, the sexual synapses back there lying dormant, repressed, activating and making his tongue burn. She didn’t say thank you. Didn’t respond. Just took his money.

Across the street from the abortion clinic is a little restaurant with a patio bar. Johnny crosses over and picks a spot where he can observe the entrance of the clinic. He checks his watch. It’s been almost two hours.

He is served by a young girl who looks slightly older than Melody. In many ways she is very much like Melody. She chatters to Johnny, about the menu, where he’s from—she knows he’s Canadian by the accent.

“Don’t get many of you down here these days. The exchange rate’s lousy,” she says. “You here on business?”

“Yup,” Johnny answers. “Feed. Grain.” He orders Sangria and sips slowly, sucking on the ice. He smokes Camels and savours their bite.

Then Melody appears, stepping gingerly out onto the cobbled sidewalk, reaching down a toe off the sill as if testing the water in a swimming pool. She stands in the evening shade of a huge elm, her arms hugging her purse, her head shifting slowly, hunting down Johnny. He stands and waves. Calls her over. She sees him and lifts her hand. Drops it. She walks towards him and Johnny assumes that she is a little dismayed, moved by the simplicity of the act she has had performed on her. If he were a woman, he would stand and hold her. But as it is he takes her elbow, helps her sit and says, “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She laughs weakly. Asks for a cigarette. She avoids him. Eyes everywhere but on his. “I’m hungry,” she says. Her face is pale.

“Wanna eat here?” Johnny asks. “Someplace else?”

Melody gives a mock shudder. “Not across from there,” she says and throws a hand carelessly backwards over her shoulder, at the place she’s just left. After Johnny pays for his barely touched drink, they drive out past strip malls and gas bars and pull in at a Pizza Hut where Melody bows before a large Pepperoni and a jug of Pepsi.

After she’s eaten her mood becomes euphoric. Hands flit like little angel wings at her shoulders. She chatters, allowing him now to see her
black pupils, round islands surrounded by blue.

“The doctor was a woman,” she says. “She was nice. Her hands were warm. Her gloves, I should say. She gave me a local, froze me down there. It’s tickling right now, kinda like the dentist and getting your feeling back in your gums. Anyways, it didn’t hurt. The doctor explained exactly what she was doing. ‘I’m going to use this instrument here,’ she said, ‘It’s called a vacurette.’ And she showed me this tiny piece of white plastic like a miniature vacuum nozzle, the kind you use for hard-to-get places, you know?”

Johnny nods. It is strange to have these intimacies explained to him. She’s just blabbing. In fact, the Pizza Hut waitress with her little eyebrow ring would do just as fine.

Melody natters, “Anyway, I didn’t feel it. ‘We have to dilate you slightly,’ the doctor says. ‘Dilate?’ I ask. ‘Open you up,’ she answers, and all I could think of was going fishing with my father and prying open the fish’s mouth to find the hook. Still, it didn’t hurt. The oddest thing though was feeling it wasn’t me. Kinda like it was someone else lying there, not Melody Krahn.
That
was creepy.”

“You still feel that way?” Johnny asks.

“No. This is me.” And she slithers another piece of pizza onto her plate and burps loudly.

Johnny doesn’t know if it’s the grass she smoked still seeping around in her brain, or the anesthetic, or just the relief, but Melody appears to want to show her gratitude because she says, “Thank you, Johnny,” several times and touches his hand, his forearm, leaving tiny cool spots there.

Melody, when she’s finished her meal, says, “You’re going to be a father soon, aren’t you?”

Johnny runs an eye down Melody’s nose, past her belled mouth, her chin, along the veins of her throat, the bones at her collar, to her breasts which are small and hidden by the mass of her sweater. “Three weeks,” he says, and he remembers as a child, the feel of a wishbone in his fingers, not quite dried, springy like this girl’s body.

Since he left Lesser with Melody at his side he’s experienced a sense
of freedom and risk. His life lately has been encircled by work and eggs and Loraine and the centre. This wonder he has been feeling with Melody—a breathless, wrong-headed, and lovely need to run—has been absent from his life. He is relieved that Melody is not blubbering and all broken up. That could have been awful, a scene full of panic and accusations. Instead she sits, her thin wrists crossed, her chin brave. The two of them could be anywhere, be anybody. Up to this point Melody has been like a lover. In the dark and unacknowledged corners of Johnny’s mind, it is as if Melody has cornered him, touched his chin with a fingertip, and whispered in his ear,
Come here, Johnny
.

And so the mention of this inevitable baby is like a quick sharp tug, as if Johnny were a kite being hauled back into captivity. One side of his mouth goes up. “Funny,” he says, and he points at Melody and then back at himself and the word comes out with an effeminate lilt, so that he has this image, seen through the eyes of Melody, of a man who is hiding his true identity. He laughs. Waits for Melody to join in. She doesn’t.

“You wanted that baby?” she asks.

“Of course.”

“And you’re a Christian, right? Like, born again?”

“Many times.”

“At what point does that become a joke?”

Johnny is solemn now. He cares deeply for this subject. “I’m beyond that,” he says. “Really, Melody, I’m lost. I have no chances left.”

There is, Johnny believes, a brief shadow of fear in Melody’s eyes. Her voice is hard though. “You’re joking.”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“I’m confused, really. I’ve been raised on the shit you’re talking about. It’s a mind-fuck. I heard someone say once, and he was a lot older than me, that we have to stop looking outside ourselves for salvation. In fact, he cursed salvation. Called it fake. What we need is awareness, you see?”

“Sounds mystical,” Johnny says. “Airy-fairy.”

Melody takes a cigarette and sucks on it deeply, as if thinking that were she to let go it would disappear. Johnny is smitten by this girl’s
intelligence, her ability to argue, to speak. She’s smooth: a beautiful girl full of doubt and cynicism who laughs, Ha, Ha, from deep in her throat and then lifts her eyebrows as if to ask,
Who laughed?

“We should go,” Johnny says. They do.

It’s past eleven. The night is colder now. In the distance, across the prairie, an April storm is approaching.

“Smells like rain,” Melody says, hand on the passenger door.

And then they’re driving and Melody sleeps a bit, jumping awake at the border, then trying to sleep again but not succeeding. Melody and Johnny don’t talk much. The barriers that fell away as they headed south are now fitting back into place as Lesser approaches. Johnny breathes with great difficulty. He whistles something, then stops. Melody finds an FM station and they listen together.

The lights of Winnipeg begin to glow. Johnny eats an Oh Henry: The King of Candyland, the wrapper says. He dislodges a peanut from his tooth and says, trying to crowd out the music, “Sweet Marie just doesn’t match up to Oh Henry. This one’s bigger, chewier.”

Melody turns and stares at him. She is weary.

Johnny takes the St. Adolphe bridge, planning to circle back along the gravel roads, following the river and then up the 312 and into town. Through the back door. He is listless now, aware of a bitter taste in his mouth, left there by overexcitement, too many cigarettes, sexual fatigue. Crossing the river into St. Adolphe, the lights of the bridge slip by. Johnny looks over at Melody. She has her eyes closed. Her neck lies back against the leather headrest. She is frightfully young. A pain, like a sharp needle, passes through Johnny’s temple and out his eye. He pulls at a fistful of hair, trying to relieve the smarting.

Close to town Johnny shuts off the air-conditioning and opens his window. The smell of Lesser, a mixture of diesel and grain, clover and rain, wet dust and a sour hint of garbage, floats into the car. Melody sits up, alert.

“To Carrie’s,” she says.

Johnny obeys. They sigh through a silent sleeping town. Carrie’s house is located at the south end, in Lesser’s only real suburb tucked away
behind the high school. Johnny stops the car a block from the house. An upstairs light glows.

“That’s Carrie’s bedroom. I’m supposed to throw a rock at the window.” Melody has the door open, one foot already on the street before she thinks of something and stops. She tosses her head. “Hey, Mr. Fehr. Thanks.” She stretches across the seat and pecks Johnny on the cheek, her bottom lip the tiniest bit wet.

“Yeah, well …” Johnny begins, but she’s gone. The car door slams and then there she is, outside, cutting across lawns, legs twinkling, a soft shadow slipping under the moon. Johnny imagines he can see her in the darkness along the edge of Carrie’s house, though he is not sure. The side door finally opens. A strip of light. A figure slipping in. The door closes.

In the morning, after spending the rest of the night at the centre, Johnny eats breakfast at Chuck’s. He arrives early and sits in a booth by himself. His head aches this morning. He should call Loraine but hasn’t quite found the courage. He’s not sure if he wants to rediscover her yet. He’s poking at an egg when Eric Godwin, Loraine’s neighbour, finds Johnny, points a finger at him, and bellows, “You little son of a bitch you. Hok-ey. Goddamn. Congratulations.”