Elizabeth and After Read Online Free PDF Page A

himself.
    “You still drinking?”
    “Not much,” Carl said.
    “Fighting?”
    “No.”
    “Well,” Chrissy said. “I’ll tell Lizzie you’re on your way.”
    It came to him that the craving he had was like a wound. A line drawn by a knife through his flesh and soul. Everything had fled the sharp steel. Sometimes the yearning hunger grew more raw with every breath and if he tried to breathe deeply the knifeline opened so wide he felt dizzy.
    Carl had been driving for four days, four days during which it seemed almost as many thousands of miles of highway had snaked between his eyes and coiled into his brain. He had the window open, the cab of his truck swirled with cool night air, the warm steady lick of rubber on pavement was running through him. He had his hands on the steering wheel in a way that unexpectedly reminded him of his father and he found himself recalling McKelvey in the kitchen, his hair a big unruly thatch, forehead burnt scarlet by the sun, swipes of grease on his T-shirt, wide lips wrapped around a cigarette while he looked mockingly across the table at Carl.
    It was after midnight and to keep himself awake he had the radio on loud. Country music. Gospel songs. Hurting songs. Songs about men and women driving around in trucks and drinking and being sorry. All that hurting was enough to make you sad except that now it was also making him want to have a real woman in his truck, a real live voice full of smoke and fire and rough edges. Maybe it was Chrissy he wanted.Ever since their conversation he’d been continuing it alone, picking it up and dropping it, explaining, complaining, blaming, saying goodbye a thousand different ways. Suddenly rounding a corner he was into the white glare of service-station light and he thought he saw a woman stepping out of the shadows, tall and wearing a billowy white shirt he couldn’t quite see.
    Carl pulled into the lot. There was no one there. Just oil-soaked air coming up from the gravel and the smell of grease from the still-open café.
    I CE R IVER , said the screen-door sign. Inside was a little of everything: fishing tackle, knives, magazines, groceries, a couple of shelves of clothes. He sat down at the counter feeling stunned. This was how it had always been when he dried out—sometimes his body would want a drink so much his circuits overloaded and he couldn’t feel anything at all.
    “Hungry?” asked the waitress.
    Carl looked up. She had on a white apron and he realized he must have seen her outside, getting something from the trailer parked at the back of the lot. Close up she was everything but ethereal: she was wearing a hairnet over dark hair that was twisted in brightly coloured plastic curlers, and as she waited for Carl to make up his mind she started tapping her foot and twitching her mouth in time.
    “Just coffee,” Carl said. He’d skipped supper but couldn’t interest himself in anything on the menu. Then he noticed a glass case with desserts and ordered a piece of blueberry pie with ice cream. It was years since he had seen a crust soaked through and stained purple with blueberry juice.
    “Home-made,” she said, bringing him what must have been a quarter of the pie. It tasted like home: sweet, sharp but no longer familiar.
    On the way out he bought an Ice River T-shirt to give Lizzie and a shirt for himself so he’d have something clean. While she was entering the numbers into the cash register, the waitress asked him if he was going far.
    “West Gull,” Carl said, as though it was a place everyone must know.
    “You want to gas up? Last chance for a hundred miles.”
    Hours later, still running on Ice River fuel, he was arrowing south from Northern Ontario to the rock-studded farmland that surrounds Long Gull Lake. He was back to thinking about the emptiness inside himself—the fear, the nervousness, the sometimes desperate craving that made his hands reach out for whatever could fill them. But as he got closer to home the