Mike is having a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the kitchen. He took the Greyhound down the Yellowhead from Edmonton for the Christmas holidays and arrived in the small hours of the morning. Ma made him bacon and eggs for breakfast and then Brittany came tripping upstairs from the basement so now Ma is making Brittany bacon and eggs too.
A lot of snow blew in overnight and Mike’s dad is shoveling the walk and the driveway.
‘I’ll do it,’ Mike had said. ‘After I have a bite to eat.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Dad.
‘You’re tired after your trip,’ said Ma. ‘Let Dad do it.’
‘Come on,’ said Mike. ‘Let me have a bite to eat and a cup of coffee then I’ll do it.’
‘Just eat your breakfast,’ said Dad.
‘It’s his exercise,’ said Ma.
Brittany is almost finished her breakfast when Dad comes back in. Stamping snow from his boots. Ma is telling Brittany a story. Mike’s heard it before. It’s about her dog when she was Brittany’s age and how it got lost in a snowstorm and found its way home. Dad pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down with them at the yellow Formica table. Lights a Dunhill.
‘Which blizzard?’ Dad asks. ‘Sixty-Six?’
‘You think Ma was four in 1966?’ asks Mike.
‘Fifty-Five?’ asks Dad.
‘Yes,’ says Ma. ‘We moved to Dauphin that year.’
‘Fifty-Five was big but Sixty-Six was bigger,’ says Dad. ‘I was already working for the railway.’
He starts telling Brittany how they dug the trains out of the snow. The story about the dog is forgotten but Ma just smiles at what a good storyteller Dad is. At how much he remembers. She starts making him his breakfast. Mike goes out for a walk and a smoke.
*
They play scrabble in the afternoon while Brittany has her nap.
‘You going to see Brittany’s mom while you’re here?’ Ma asks.
‘When she picks Brittany up on Boxing Day,’ says Mike.
‘She’s such a good mom,’ says Ma. ‘She is so generous with Brittany. She lets us have her over whenever we want.’
‘If it suits,’ says Dad.
‘It almost always suits,’ says Ma.
Ma gets a triple-word. Mike rearranges his vowels. Dad lights a Dunhill.
‘You should take her out for dinner while you’re here,’ says Ma. ‘We’ll babysit.’
‘Jesus Christ, Ma.’
‘Leave him alone, Carol,’ says Dad.
*
After dinner Mike goes downstairs with Brittany to help her clean up the toys scattered about on the big oval carpet. The carpet is made of ropes machine-braided together: muted green, brown, and yellow. The toys were his: Fisher Price, Tonka, Micronauts. He reads to Brittany in the hide-a-bed they are sharing, feeling the metal frame through the mattress. He tucks her in and goes upstairs to watch the Leafs with Dad. They have a couple of rye and cokes and Dad falls asleep on the recliner.
Ma is on the phone so Mike goes to the Cambridge and gets drunk. One of the waitresses recognizes him from back in the day and they exchange long overlapping lists of names and anecdotes. Between that and the beer the abject futility of it all begins to feel like nostalgia.
*
Mike walks home along the tracks, breath hanging in the air, glittering slabs of snow breaking under his boots. He’s thinking about his dad working at CN for forty years. Thinking about the semis on the highway. Thinking about grain and cattle and oil. Before that fur and rum and tobacco. Before that pottery, shell, obsidian. All that moving of things back and forth across the surface of the earth. Back and forth and back and forth. He thinks about sitting on the Greyhound staring out the window at all the identical towns with the identical prairie behind them. He thinks about the kids who got on the bus in Saskatoon. Smoking weed and talking shit at every stop. Denim and leather and black-and-red Mackinaw jackets in the -40. Hair in their eyes. Shivering in the acid wind.
Mike bought some hash from them in Minnedosa and some Rizlas from the gas station. He decides to smoke it in the garage when he gets home. He’s out of ciggies so he’ll mix it with tobacco from Dad’s Dunhills. It’ll be like high school.
He thinks about Brittany sound asleep in the hide-a-bed and almost laughs from the joy of how small she is, how compact. How she stares at him while she thinks god-knows-what. Her tiny hands as she picks up the things from the floor. He thinks about how much he missed her while he was away. How much he’ll miss her again. He thinks about those kids on the Greyhound and how they were all out of their heads on shrooms and weed and they told him about a stretch of highway just before Portage La Prairie where the bus goes through a cold spot, a dark spot. A place where terrible things have happened, and will happen, and if you say the right words and you lift your feet from the floor at the precise moment when you pass through that spot you can make a deal with the devil just like Robert Johnson did. You can get whatever you want from life.
When the kids told him ‘This is it! This it! Raise your feet! Make your wish!’ he raised his feet and made his wish and felt nothing but the usual sense of the world stretching out in all directions around him filled with nothing but what had always been there to begin with and besides what did he want that wasn’t already there? That wasn’t going to happen anyways? What did he want but that same old shit that everyone had ever wanted and which he already had?
Robert G. Penner is a Canadian living in western Pennsylvania. He has published short stories in numerous speculative and literary fiction journals under various pseudonyms and is the founder and editor of Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction. His debut novel Strange Labour is forthcoming with Radiant Press. Find Robert at @billsquirrell and robertgpenner.com.
