The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read Online Free PDF

futon in the other room, the room that had been empty since my roommate skipped out on me. Marty stayed there until midday Sunday. I could hear him snoring. Once or twice in the night I heard him get up to use the washroom, a bear of aman, a lumberjack, shaking the whole apartment as he moved, then planting his feet before the toilet and uncorking a torrent of piss. Water running, then slow, heavy footsteps back down the hallway, the sound of a California redwood being felled as he tumbled back into bed, and then nothing, just faint sawing, for hours and hours thereafter.
    A chinook had followed Marty down from the hills, and Sunday was a warm, springy day, a breeze alive with smells where the day before it had been cold and dead. By Sunday noon it was a beaut of a day, the sun at its full strength, the sound of water running off the roofs, everything slick. I could sit at my window and watch the snowbanks below melting like ice cubes in an empty glass. I’d opened the windows and was listening to CCR when Marty emerged from the second bedroom. I always listen to CCR when winter turns to spring, and even if this was a false beginning, I needed to feel good about things after the winter I’d had.
    “What in the hell are you doing?” he asked me.
    “Polishing my boots,” I said. I was standing hunched over the table where I’d spread out newspapers, some spare rags, and an old shoebox containing my polish kit: a tin of polish, two brushes, and a shining rag.
    “Look at you, your highness!”
    “Sunday,” I said. “Every Sunday I polish my boots. My dad used to do it.”
    “I see,” he said, then looked around, sniffed, and rubbed his stomach. The smell of polish in his nose must have reminded him of the smell of food.
    “Got any vittles here?” he asked.
    “Sure, yeah. Cereal, toast …”
    “Eggs? Bacon? Potatoes?”
    “Yeah,” I said, “though the potatoes might have sprouted.”
    “All right then, you do your thing, I’ll cook.” And he did. He went to work in my pathetic little kitchen, and with a cutting board, a dull knife, and a single fry pan he beavered away until he had made us a rich spread of eggs and bacon, toast, beans, warm stewed tomatoes. When my plate was empty he refilled it. Only once I was done did Marty sit down and eat. He had thirds, finished everything. I had forgotten this about Marty, that he loved to spend time in the kitchen, and that Eileen never had to cook.
    By mid-afternoon, still full, we were sitting on the couch sharing my cigarettes, the sliding door to the patio wide open to let in the sweet warm breeze. CCR had given way to Rush in the five-disc changer: Marty’s choice.
    “What time do you work tomorrow?” Marty asked me.
    “One,” I said. “One ’til close.”
    “Good, then you can sleep in,” he said, lighting another.
    “Why do I need to sleep in?”
    “There’s a bar I think we should close tonight,” he said. “Passed it on the way here.”
    And I thought, why not? What’s the worst that could happen to me, in the company of this man who’d cooked me such a generous meal, on a Sunday night in the foothills with the warm breath of springtime upon me?
    “Let’s do that,” I said.
    We took my truck, the truck I drove out to Alberta from Kingston, the truck that I lived in for two weeks until I found an apartment. It occurred to me that there was no definite planas to what we might do with the truck, how we might get back to my apartment or, failing that, where we would stay after this night of drinking. It’s something I felt that we were actively not discussing, a thing floating between us. I kept returning to it in my head, but deciding that I shouldn’t bring it up, because I felt like Marty was daring me to do just that, to be the responsible one, so that he could be proven, in a single chop, the opposite. Marty defined himself by these sorts of oppositions.
    We drove west, straight toward the Rockies, which loomed purple and holy before