Cape Breton Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked down at the Lada sputtering and trembling in the dark. In its headlights snow danced like moths. Kitchen light faintly reached the open car door, the leg of a woman in jeans, her black fur-trimmed boot resting on the running board. Radio music was going and her foot tapped to it. A hand appeared gracefully, palm up, received a few flakes of snow, and then withdrew. Innis could make out the edge of a wide-brimmed hat but not the face beneath it. Jesus, his uncle never brought a woman into the house, not since Innis had been here. You won’t be driving, he’d told Innis the first day, I don’t have to tell you you won’t get near the wheel of a car while you’re in this house. I’m not turning my life around to make room for you, but we’ll be okay for the time it takes you to get straightened away.
    Starr came out of the bathroom zipping up. “Now youknow where my money is,” he said. On his uncle, alcohol always seemed like cologne, definite but not dangerous. He gazed into Innis’s face with mock gravity but he meant it. “And I know it will always be there. Eh?”
    “You mean I can’t skim any?”
    “I’ll skim it off your hide.”
    “Another Friday and I’m trapped here, Starr. No wheels, nowhere to get to, nothing.”
    “Look, you had wheels back in Boston, but they didn’t belong to you, did they? They shipped you back here and you’re not exactly our idea of an AI immigrant. Felony deportees don’t deserve much, not for awhile, now do they? It’s a probation, like.”
    “In your eyes maybe. I left all that at the border, I paid my dues in the States. It’s a clean slate here.”
    “And clean we’ll keep it.”
    “I been here seven months clean as a whistle. I bet I’ve walked more woods than you have in a lifetime.”
    “You’d like to think so. Just because you don’t see me doesn’t mean I’m never up there.”
    A polite toot came from the driveway.
    “She’s antsy, I’m off. Don’t use so much damn water. Oil isn’t cheap, you know.”
    “Why didn’t you ask her to come in?”
    Starr cocked his head, looked him up and down slowly. “With a dangerous man like you in here?”
    He laughed and started down the stairs singing without words, then stopped and looked back at Innis. “Let’s keep it simple. That’s best for me and you too. Right?”
    “Whatever you say, Uncle Starr.”
    “And don’t call me Uncle. It makes me sound like a geezer.”
    When he was gone, Innis looked again into the attic dark. Satisfied, he closed the door and locked it. Where did Starr get his ideas of what was best? What was Innis, a freak?
    So, no women, a cold Friday night, but at least the house was his. Drafty as a barn anyway. To hell with the bath. Leave it for Starr, he could cool his nuts in it when he got home. Innis jacked up the basement oil furnace and pokered the coal in the big iron stove his uncle used for heat in the kitchen and sometimes for cooking when he felt nostalgic, shifting pots about on its flat surface as he recounted how skilled Granny had been, boiling water here, and simmering fish over there, baking the best bannock in the oven at the same time. The sink tap pattered on the black skillet and its crescent of chilled grease. After warming his hands over the stove, he fished out upstairs a small wooden stash box, hidden in a boot in his bedroom closet. He unwrapped with great care a ball of tinfoil: his beautiful seeds, the ones he hadn’t used. In his palm he worked them around with his finger like diamonds. The party at Mohney’s brother’s apartment back in Boston where the hippie guy pressed the seeds into his hand like they were magic: Put them in the earth, man, they’ll bring you joy. Right on. Promising plumpness and color, so said the book Innis kept under his mattress. Miraculous things, seeds. He squeezed them in his fist. Summer. Heat. Green leaves spreading like hands, flower tops dense as bullrushes. But God, when would this winter let go?
    He