The Drive Read online

  ‘Sakra,’ she kept saying, swearing to herself in Czech. ‘Sakra!’

  The fish cut back and forth, tugging hard on the line. She moved with it, following the rod like a diviner, and the whole crowd moved with her. Whenever the fish relented, she took in a bit of line. She fought it like that for maybe fifteen minutes. When the fish finally breached the surface, everybody gasped in unison. It was a huge salmon, a Chinook, and it was going crazy – twisting and convulsing on the hook. From the wharf to the water it was about a ten-foot drop. She reeled the fish up slowly, and when it cleared the edge of the dock it was still flapping, scattering water and scales everywhere. All the fishermen whooped and applauded and moved in closer.

  She lowered the salmon to the dock, and looked at me.

  ‘I caught it,’ she said, panting, ‘so you have to kill it.’

  ‘I do?’

  The Chinese guy nodded gravely, as if he understood the logic of this. Among his gear he had a wooden club, like a child’s baseball bat. He handed it to me. The other fishermen stood in a semi-circle and watched. We knelt together. She pinned the flopping fish in place and I brought the bat down on the back of its head, hard. It quivered and went still. One of its eyes had popped out and blood began leaking from its gills. We stood up, holding the fish between us, and the fishermen cheered again. Even the foot passengers cheered. It was as if we’d sealed something, or signed a pact. Then the boat horn sounded, the ferry pulled away and the fishermen dispersed. We thanked the Chinese man and carried our catch back to the loading area.

  We didn’t have a cooler to store it in but we had our camping gear, so we decided to cook the salmon, on the beach next to the terminal. Zuzska knew all about cleaning fish. She hacked off its head first, then slit open its belly. Its heart and kidneys spilled out, glistening like gems. While she scraped away the rest of the guts I got the camping stove going. We cracked open a couple of Kokanees, sat down in the sand, and fried up chunks of salmon.

  ‘It’s just like Christmas,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody has fish at Christmas.’

  ‘We do.’

  Instead of turkey, apparently her family always had carp. They would keep a carp in the bathtub in the weeks leading up to Christmas. They’d feed it and name it and treat it like a pet. Then, on Christmas Day, they would kill it to eat.

  ‘Poor fish.’

  She shrugged. ‘Fish are stupid.’

  She plucked a piece of salmon from the pan, popped it in her mouth, and licked the oil off her fingers. We stayed there, eating and drinking, until the ferry arrived, then had to pack up and go get in line with the other foot passengers. The people around us kept staring at her. She’d washed her hands but her forearms still shimmered with slime and water. Blood streaks stained the front of her dress, and fish scales sparkled on her cheeks, her neck, her chest. She stank of the sea, and she looked like a beautiful and particularly brutal mermaid.

  That was Zuzska for you.

  Somebody was honking at me. I checked the rear-view. There was an SUV behind me, riding my ass and flashing its lights. Without meaning to, I’d slowed down to forty klicks. I could see the driver hunched over his wheel, snarling at me. He was a bald guy wearing tinted glasses and a flat cap. Instead of speeding up I tapped the brakes – just to mess with him.

  He swung into the other lane, pulled alongside me, and started screaming through his open window.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, asshole?’

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ I shouted back. ‘Driving!’

  ‘You mean daydreaming!’

  ‘Yeah – I’m daydreaming about your sister!’

  We argued like that for a while, shouting and swearing and swerving erratically in our lanes. Partly I was pissed off because I knew he was right. I’d come on this trip to forget about her, to get away from her, to get over her, and I was already sinking into sentimentality.

  ‘Pull your head out of your ass!’

  ‘I hear you, okay?’ I screamed. ‘Now fuck off!’

  I hit the gas, leaving him and Tsawwassen behind.

  chapter 4

  We filmed at the airport until dusk. The sky melted into marmalade and the planes continued crawling around in it. The director said, ‘That’s a wrap,’ and handed out call sheets for the next morning. The actors were allowed to go. The crew stayed behind to pack up the gear. Afterwards the DP dropped me off at a bus station on Marine Drive, and I caught the No.10 up Granville. The bus was crammed with commuters – all of them shuffling, rustling, shifting – but I found a seat near the back. I sat and cradled my camera case and gazed out the window.

  I remember I was still thinking about those blips, transmitted from the radar tower. I tried to imagine the way they pulsed through the air – wave after wave of them, washing over the planes, mapping their locations on traffic control screens. If those same signals had been hitting our microphone, maybe they carried on even further, lapping at cars, trees, buildings, streets, people, everything. And, if you had some kind of ultra-sensitive detector, you might even be able to create a radar map of the entire city – a glowing green grid that charted the progress of day-to-day life in Vancouver.

  Then my phone rang. It was Zuzska, calling from Prague. We normally talked a bit later because of the time difference, but I didn’t think that meant anything.

  I answered. ‘Hey, kočka.’

  She was crying. She told me that she’d slept with somebody, or been sleeping with somebody. It was hard to hear – she kept choking on her words – but the meaning trickled through to me. I felt around for a cord or button to stop the bus, and accidentally pulled the emergency lever instead. An alarm went off – this steady droning, like a shotclock buzzer. The bus lurched. The driver was pulling over. I stood up, with the phone still mashed to my ear. All the passengers were looking at me. I walked down the aisle between them, stunned and helpless, like a groom going to the altar. The driver didn’t get mad, or demand to know what was going on. He just opened the automatic doors for me. I’ll always appreciate that.

  I stumbled past him and stepped off the bus.

  ‘Say something,’ Zuzska said. ‘Say anything.’

  But I couldn’t. My larynx had seized up. I made an odd, pathetic noise, like a cat mewling, and ended the call. The bus was pulling away. It had left me next to a chain-link fence, and a field full of weeds. I threw the phone into the field, flinging it as far as I could. Then I bent over and put my hands on my knees, feeling sick. I didn’t actually think I was going to puke, but I did. I puked in the gravel at the roadside. All those jelly doughnuts came back up, along with the ravioli we’d had for lunch. The puke was thick, red and slimy – my blood and guts, lying there for all the world to see.

  I sat down on my camera case. Cars hummed past, zipping about the city’s grid, still being mapped by the blips. They carried on and I stayed there, in a kind of catatonic stupor, until the sun went down and the sky grew dark and I started to shiver. Then I remembered something: my phone. It was still out in that field. I climbed the fence and thrashed around among the nettles and dandelions, hunting blindly for it, crying like a child.

  chapter 5

  On my left the big white arch rose up, looming over traffic and straddling the centre of the boulevard like the legs of an albino colossus. I’d arrived at the Peace Arch Border Crossing. There were seven lanes open. Going into the States, choosing a good lane is crucial. If you get the wrong border guard, you can end up being hassled, interrogated or searched – all the things I wanted to avoid. I’d drunk a couple of beers and I had some weed on me – enough for maybe three joints. I’d packed it all into the straw of a slurpee. This way, if they searched me, I could suck the weed up through the straw and swallow it – there’d be no trace. But I preferred not to have to do that, for obvious reasons, and it all depended on the line I chose.

  ‘Left is always right,’ I said, and turned that way.

  My whole life, I’ve put faith in tha
t nonsensical motto. I sat in the left lane, tapping the steering wheel, and inched along behind a station wagon. The sky sagged down, heavy with cloud, and there was a mugginess to the summer air. I opened my window. The other drivers were listening to their stereos, and the mixture of tinny pop tunes drifted between the vehicles. My rental car had a stereo, too, but I left it off. I didn’t feel like playing music.

  The line shifted. I moved forward.

  I’d been over this border countless times – first with my old man when I was a kid, and later with my friends, as teenagers. Cross-border shopping trips were a great Canadian tradition. I knew all the tricks: smile and nod, hand over your passport, address the guard as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, politely answer his or her questions. Be specific, but not too specific. It had always worked when I’d gone down to pick up Zuzska. Sometimes, for her visits, she would fly into Seattle, since flights were cheaper to the US than to Canada, and I would drive down to meet her. It was two and a half hours one-way, and by the time I reached Sea-Tac airport I would be sickened, shaky, quaking with lust and anticipation. I developed my own set of rituals to calm down. I would drink two beers at the airport bar, brush my teeth in the bathroom, and win a stuffed animal for her from one of those grabbing-claw games. After her flight landed, I’d stand and count the passengers emerging from Customs, telling myself that before I reached a certain number she would appear. When she finally did, it was like being jolted with a defibrillator.

  The line shifted. I moved forward.

  Our ride home from the airport had its own rituals. En route we’d be kissing and touching, laughing and chatting. I’d struggle to keep the car straight, to stay on course. At the border we would have to explain what I was doing, bringing a foreign body back into my country. We would smile and tell them our story: how I’d gone to live in Prague, how she’d been my Czech language teacher, how we’d fallen in bilingual love. The guards always smiled back, won over. Ah, you could see them thinking, young love. They would stamp both our passports, as if confirming the validity of our relationship. A few weeks later, on the way back down, we’d go through the whole process again with the American guards.

  The line shifted. It was my turn.

  I rolled down my window. As I pulled up at the booth I could see the guard inside, watching me. I smiled and handed him my passport. He had pale, spotted cheeks and puffy sacs under his jaw, like a toad. He was sitting on a high stool.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘Just down to the States, sir.’

  He stared at me as if I’d told him the sky was blue.

  ‘On a little road trip, I mean. Through Washington and Oregon.’ That sounded fairly specific. Was I being specific enough? ‘And maybe on to San Francisco.’

  He leaned forward, peering at me. He had those crazy bubble-eyes that bulge out.

  ‘San Francisco?’ he said.

  ‘I have a friend who lives there.’

  I could tell I shouldn’t have mentioned San Francisco. It was full of hippies and liberals and potheads and queers. In his mind, anyways.

  ‘This your car?’

  ‘No, sir. It’s a rental.’

  He held my passport up to his nose. ‘You live in Vancouver but you rented a car?’

  ‘I don’t have my own. And I really wanted to go on this road trip.’

  That clinched it. He handed me back my passport without stamping it. ‘Could you pull over beside the Customs office?’ he asked, pointing it out.

  It was a white building just beyond the border. The windows were tinted and you couldn’t see inside. I parked next to it and turned off my car. I knew the drill because I’d been searched before, on one of those shopping trips with my old man, before my stepmom was on the scene. We’d gone down for the day and were smuggling goods back: toys and T-shirts and video games. A lot of families did the same, and occasionally the guards searched people, hoping to slap a customs charge on them. But we’d been ready for them. We had cut the tags off the clothes and opened the toys and gotten rid of all the receipts and boxes and packaging.

  This time, I was ready for them too.

  I reached for my slurpee. At first it seemed as if the straw was plugged. I couldn’t get any suction going. I sucked harder, and it all came up at once – a burst of cherry slurpee and weed that made me choke. I coughed and spluttered, trying to get it down. Bits of bud got stuck between my teeth. I had to rinse out my mouth with slurpee, working the slush around my gums, but managed to swallow most of it. I figured I had maybe half an hour before a devastating body-stone kicked in.

  The door to the Customs office opened. A woman in a blue uniform came out with a dog. She was a small woman but her dog was very big. A German shepherd, I think. I got out of the car, still holding my slurpee.

  ‘We’re going to give the vehicle an inspection, sir,’ she said. ‘Would you mind opening the trunk for me?’

  As I went to do that, her dog started sniffing around the hubcaps. Apparently the hubcaps were a hotspot. The woman held one hand low on the dog’s leash, near its collar. I’d left my door open, and the next place they checked was the front seat. The dog put its paws where I’d been sitting and snorted at the upholstery, getting closer to the cup-holder.

  ‘The trunk is open,’ I said, hopefully, ‘if you want to check there.’

  The woman ignored me. Her dog now had its nose right inside the cup-holder, poking around like a pig snuffling for truffles.

  ‘What is it, Herbie?’ the woman asked. ‘What’s there?’

  Herbie made a sound in his throat, uncertain. I’d walked around the side of the car to watch. Herbie glanced over his shoulder at me. He was obviously a smart fucking dog. For a few seconds we sort of had a staring contest. Then his ears went back, flat on his head.

  He roared and jumped at me.

  ‘Holy shit!’ I cried.

  His paws thumped my chest and I fell over backwards, screaming. But Herbie wasn’t going for me. He’d clamped on to my slurpee cup. He held it in his teeth and shook it back and forth, as if he’d caught a rabbit. Slurpee sprayed everywhere.

  ‘Easy, Herbie.’ The woman pulled hard on the lead. ‘Easy, boy.’

  Herbie sat back and panted, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. Pink slurpee juice dripped from his jaws. The woman crouched down to examine the mess he’d made. She looked from the cup to me. I was still sprawled on the concrete.

  ‘Maybe he just really likes slurpee,’ I said.

  chapter 6

  The night she called was the night I stopped sleeping. I came home from the film shoot and slunk into my suite. I was living in my dad’s garage conversion and didn’t want to face him or Amanda, my stepmom.

  I dropped my camera case and stood in the centre of the living room. The floor was covered in cinematic detritus: film canisters and video tapes and memory cards and lenses and filters and scrims and hard drives and scraps of paper filled with storyboards, character sketches, dialogue notes. I’d been cultivating this creative nest, a den full of story, but none of it could help me now. I was completely off-script. I just stood looking around, panicky and disorientated, like an actor trying to remember his lines.

  I had three full-size movie posters on my walls. One showed Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way, holding a handgun. The other two were for Casino and The Godfather. The first time she’d visited, Zuzska had jumped all over me about them. ‘What is the point of this?’ she’d said, striking a Pacino pose. ‘You like guns? You want to be a gangster?’ Then she’d told me that guns were a phallic symbol and that I obviously had middle-class masculinity issues. She was taking these night courses in psychology and thought that made her an expert.

  At the bottom of the Casino poster, the Las Vegas cityscape sparkled like a distant galaxy. The year before, Zuzska and I had driven down to Vegas, and almost gotten married in secret. We’d thought it would help sort out all the immigration difficulties if I ever moved to the Czech Republic, or she ever moved to Canada. I
thought about that for a few minutes, and then went over and ripped that goddamn poster off the wall. I attacked it like a demented house cat: tearing it into strips, and tearing the strips into bits, and scattering the bits all over like confetti. Then I dropped to my knees and pounded the carpet with the soft underside of my fist – once, twice, three times – and clutched at my skull, as if it was about to burst open.

  I whimpered.

  Eventually I crawled over to my kitchen table. It was a lime-green laminate table that doubled as my work desk. I got out a pen and some paper and started writing: How could you do this to me, to us… Then I stopped. The words were too familiar. I tried again, and again, but it was always the same – lines I’d heard in films, or read in books. I had none of my own. I filled seven pages of loose-leaf paper and the best I could come up with was this: It’s as if you’ve reopened Pandora’s Box, and let all the evil in the world out again, but this time you shut the box on hope. Worse, you shut the box just as hope was trying to get out – so hope got caught between the lid and the edge of the box. Hope got crushed. Hope has broken ribs, a burst spleen, a shattered sternum. Hope’s back is broken. There is no hope for hope.

  Even that was just a reference to something else. Also, it made me sound insane. So I didn’t send it. I didn’t send any of my letters. Most ended up on the floor as balls of paper. When the ink ran dry I put on some Miles Davis and got incredibly sentimental. I watched Cinema Paradiso, played solitaire, and drank half a mickey of absinthe. I read the first page of The Unbearable Lightness of Being over and over, trying to get the words to make sense. She’d given it to me for our anniversary, and told me she’d always be my Tereza. At dawn, I made myself coffee and sat on the back porch, beneath the pine tree. I could smell the brine of the Cove. It was quiet out there. I trembled in the quiet, quivering like a leaf.