Bad Ideas Read online

  Little Michelle. Only five feet tall, nineteen years old. But cranky as hell. Bossy. Mean, sometimes. She had held on to him so tightly the morning he left, he couldn’t draw a full breath. Crushing him. Wetly snuffling into his chest. He had walked out to his truck in the freezing cold early morning air, resisting the impulse to run, to skip and jump, to speed away, his foot to the floor. This was true. Though, he did love her — in a protective, rough-and-tumble, bickering kind of way. And it scared him. He was only twenty-one, had only ever been fifty miles from home. He had believed that he was going away to find himself, to be among men, to settle down enough to settle down.

  He hadn’t gone looking for trouble.

  But trouble found him alright.

  Gorgeous trouble, half-drunk and teetering on cheap pink high heels.

  Because everything inside you has been rearranged

  Darren knew something about love. He knew that if you neglected it for too long, it could be erased. And that one love could replace another. Blot it out completely. His wife knew it, too.

  That morning, so long ago, when he had driven away from Claire and Trudy and Tammy, he turned the radio up loud and cranked the rear-view mirror to the side so that all he could see, all that was reflected there, was the grey-blue river and the pale sky and not that sad trio standing at the end of the driveway, fading into the distance. And when he pulled into that other driveway back in Brownsville, when he put the truck in park and turned off the engine, he couldn’t get out.

  He sat there, staring at the front of his in-laws’ house, at the yellowing cream polyester sheers pulled across the living room window, wondering how he could arrange his face so that nobody would know. How he could possibly convince anyone that he was happy to be home.

  When his head, his chest felt hollow. When everything inside him had been rearranged.

  Minutes passed. He saw the sheers part and fall back into place. Still, he couldn’t move. He just sat there until the front door opened and Michelle came out onto the front step and stood there, hands on hips. Darren took a deep breath and opened the door, hopped down onto the gravel. His knees buckled. He steadied himself against the side of the truck and raised a hand to wave, pulled his face into a smile. He grabbed his duffle bag from behind the seat, slammed the door, and as he made his way around the front of the truck, he laid his hand on the warm metal of the hood, doubled over, and started to retch.

  As his hot vomit splashed over the gravel and onto his work boots, Michelle turned her back on him and went into the house. And when she slammed the front door, her eyes turned from soft brown to flint.

  Because you don’t get to choose your dreams

  But he did go inside the house, finally. And he stayed. Darren stayed with Michelle and made the best of it, as they say.

  And in twenty years away from Cornwall, Preston Mills, and the Seaway, Darren had never once dreamed about Claire. The only dreams he ever had about that time were about the tunnels and the fish.

  At Long Sault, tunnels had been dug under the Cornwall canal so workers could get to the work site: a dam that would be thousands of feet long when it was finished. The Americans had built a pontoon bridge for their workers, but the Canadians hiked through tunnels under the canal like moles in the dark, emerging at the site dirty and clammy and blinking into the bright sunlight.

  Ships were still using the old canal, and some mornings when Darren and the other men were making their way through the dark, damp tunnels, the earth would start to tremble beneath their feet and pebbles would tumble off the walls and onto the ground. They would stop, picturing the long ship passing overhead and praying that the walls would not fall in and crush them. Sometimes, he would wake in his bed, feeling the weight of the earth on his chest, the mud in his eyes.

  And the fish. He had dreams about the fish. Two dams had been built a couple of miles apart, and the water between them pumped out over the course of weeks. When the bottom of the river was finally in sight, it was covered with fish and eels, flopping around in the mud. Darren and the other workers waded through them in rubber boots, carrying tubs of water between them and picking out the game fish to be returned to the river. The other fish, the “coarse” fish, would be shipped out, processed, and sold. Maybe they made cat food with it or something; Darren had no idea. They had been given charts to study. Good fish and bad fish. Pike, trout, bass, sturgeon: these were the good ones. He had tried to commit them to memory, the pictures of the green and silver and spotted fish, the placement of their fins, the shapes of their heads. He thought he was ready. But Darren had been stunned by the size and strength of some of the fish. Muskie, carp longer than your arm, weighing fifty pounds or more. Days and days he spent wading through the mud, the panicked fish flailing at his feet, thrashing in his arms, soaking his clothes, their powerful tails whipping around and bruising his thighs.

  In his dreams, his boot catches in the mud and he pitches forward, falling hard onto the muddy, writhing riverbed. His body is sinking and the fish are flopping onto him, all over him. An eel slithers out of the mud and around his neck, the head of a huge carp thuds against the middle of his back, knocking the air out of him.

  Michelle’s flint eyes stared at him in the dark as he tore at the sheets, gasping for breath.

  Jules

  Because it’s hard to tell the difference between flying and falling

  Jules was about to fly. He was in the middle of an outdoor arena in upstate New York doing doughnuts in a beat-up piece-of-shit car, the wheels throwing up clouds of grey-brown dust. A couple of girls in cowboy boots and bikinis were walking around, holding up checkered flags as if this were a race. As if there were more than one fool in more than one car. He wouldn’t be breaking any records today, not in this thing. An old hard-top convertible, the roof bolted on. He and the boys had removed the windshield (carefully — the scrapyard wanted to keep it), the side mirrors, and the sun visors. Anything that could come undone had been undone. He wished he had a better car, one with less rattle and give, but what the hell. Typical.

  He had been touring for ten years with the International Hell Drivers. International because he was Canadian and the rest of the stunt drivers were from the States. He had been making about three jumps a week. Depending on the weather, his injuries, the ability to get shitty cars, to book dates in shitty towns. But now it was all about the Challenger. The pretend rocket car before the real rocket car. Now, it was all about promotion.

  And then one last flying leap across the St. Lawrence River.

  Jules took a final lap around the arena and turned sharp, fishtailing into starting position. Dirt coated his teeth, his tongue, was caught in his eyelashes. He revved the engine and waved at the crowd. Maybe two hundred people scattered here and there in the bleachers. He took a few deep breaths of the warm June air before snapping his visor down. Sweat trickled down his back. The hair on his arms stood on end. Watch this, fuckers.

  The film of dust on his visor made the world look dreamier, softer. The red, white, and blue paint on the ramp straight ahead was faded and blurred. The junkyard cars were lined up, numbers spray-painted on their hoods, one through sixteen. There was no ramp at the other end. He would land where he landed — likely on numbers twelve, thirteen, and fourteen.

  The crowd was chanting. JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! He cocked his right knee back to his chin and drove it down onto the accelerator, laid his head back against the headrest. The car vibrated, rattled over the packed dirt, and made a hollow boom as the tires hit the wooden ramp. The steering wheel was almost shaking out of his hands, and, with a sickening falling away, a familiar lightness in his chest, he was airborne. Rising in a long arc up into the air, he looked out over the bleachers at the woolly clouds gathering in the blue sky; time stretched and stopped, letting him hang there and enjoy himself for a moment.

  Like being at the top of a Ferris wheel, looking out over the fairground.

 
He shot a hand out the window in a quick salute, and the crowd went wild. He felt a slight tilt, a shift in the angle, and he grabbed the wheel again as if it would make any difference. As if he could steer with the wheels hanging helpless in the air. Blue, green, brown, white, grey, the cars passed below him, blurring together. He had a chance of a clean landing on the far side. Could he possibly make it? He leaned his chest toward the dash, trying to urge the car forward with his weight. The crowd was silent, rapt, breath collectively held.

  The earth loomed as the car lost altitude. He came down hard on top of the last two cars, and his body pitched forward. Jules felt a jolt up his right leg. The car listed to the side, leaning off the edge of the heap of crushed metal. The crew ran across the field toward the car. His foot was still on the accelerator. Why? He pulled his leg back, but it was as if it were made out of mud.

  The engine sputtered and died.

  He looked down. His right foot was pointed slightly upward, toes toward him, and he couldn’t straighten it out. He felt his boot tighten dangerously.

  Something was broken. Again.

  Shit-damn-fuck.

  Christ.

  Overtaken, defeated, he sat back and waited for the crew to come and help him out of the car. Rain began to fall. He could hear it. Raindrops on the hood, making bright spots in the grime. People in the bleachers stood and turned away, inching down the rows to the stairs. Jules reached down and unzipped his boot, pulling at the heel. His foot looked bloated and boneless in his dirty sock and pain rushed in, amplifying with every beat of his heart. Thump, thump, thump. He was sweating through every pore.

  “The mic! Bring me to the microphone! Tell them not to go!” he gestured frantically as they pulled him from the car, waving his hand in a summoning motion, as if he could pull the microphone through the air toward him. The MC sprinted to the centre of the arena, grabbed the mic, and started talking fast, trying to get the crowd to sit tight. Hold on folks. The Crazy Canuck has something to say. The crowd waited. Mostly, they were still standing, half-turned away. The rain was getting heavier. This had better be good.

  They carried Jules across the dirt in a stretcher, helmet still on, pushing his head awkwardly forward, his chin against his chest. At Jules’s urging, one of the other hell riders raced over to the Challenger, parked at the edge of the arena, and revved the engine. Sparks and orange flames shot out of the turbine. People sat down. Put newspapers or jackets over their heads.

  “That’s my baby!” said Jules into the mic. “A lot of you probably know we’re building a ramp in Preston Mills, on the Canadian side, and I’m gonna try to jump one mile over the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car. This summer. Stay tuned. Thanks for coming, folks! Now I have to go to the hospital.” Ha, ha, thought Jules. Very funny. That punchline was starting to wear thin.

  The crowd, what was left of it, clapped politely, gave a whoop or two.

  The “rocket car” powered down with a chug and a clunk.

  Because everything looks left behind

  Jules drove back to Preston Mills left-footed, his right foot in a cast. Crutches leaning against the passenger seat. He crossed the border at Cornwall, the bridge arching high over the enormous St. Lawrence River. Dark and rough and rippling with menace. Some days, to Jules, it looked like it was teeming with monsters, masses of tentacles unfurling, waving just below the surface. The metal grate of the bridge made a hum against his tires. On the Canadian side, he pulled up to the customs window and handed the officer his birth certificate.

  “How long were you in the United States, sir?

  “Twelve hours.”

  “And what was the purpose of your visit?”

  Jules offered a mumbling summary of events. “I’m a professional daredevil,” delivered with a smirk. Sheepish.

  “I see.” The border guard looked down into the car at the crutches and the cast. “Room for improvement, I guess.”

  “Absolutely right.” Jules nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “On your way, then. Welcome home, Mr. Tremblay. Drive carefully.” A wide smile broke through the guard’s tough-guy demeanor as Jules pulled away.

  Ridiculous. He felt ridiculous. Maybe he should have mentioned his TV deal, his future jump across the river, his big plans. But who would believe him, the shape he was in? Bags under his eyes, unshaven, slumped into the driver’s seat in a filthy sweatshirt. His bare toes sticking out of the cast looked purple, suffocated. Pathetic. He turned onto the old highway to drive along the water, the road winding along beside marshy inlets and the old stone canals. Farm houses set far back in the fields down long lanes lined with scraggly wind-blown poplars. Grassy ditches flowing with muddy water. A dog here and there chained to a spike in the ground. Cows huddled together in pastures.

  What a sad, magic place this was.

  Every single thing looked unloved, forgotten, left behind.

  Because in the country, birds make an unbelievable racket

  As the pavement turned to gravel on Old Murphy Road, he saw her car, the green Dodge, parked by the side of the road a hundred yards past the laneway. The little girl’s face appeared in the rear window, a white circle. Jules thought he saw her small hand wave at him as the car pulled back onto the road and Trudy started to drive away. Fine, he thought. Christ. He turned into what passed for a driveway — really just a couple of muddy, pebbly tracks overgrown with tall grass — and he felt his tires sink slightly into the spongey turf.

  He turned off the car and looked out at the bay, the cattails waving, rustling in the breeze.

  A red-winged blackbird perched on a bending reed made a mechanical trill.

  A kingfisher stood on the sagging hydro wire slung between the house and the pole at the road, its head turned sharply to one side.

  Chickadees flitted about the bushes, and Jules sat in the car, listening to the birds and the breeze, trying to muster the energy to hobble and hop to the house and tell his stupid story.

  The screen door opened and James stepped out onto the porch, smiling and waving him in. Alright, thought Jules. Gimme twenty minutes, I’ll be right there.

  Witnessing his elaborate tussle with the car door and the crutches, James and Mark came to his rescue, bearing him across the muddy lawn and into the house.

  Finally seated at the round white Formica table in the middle of the old dilapidated kitchen, he was laying out his tale for the entertainment of his friends. The slate-coloured sky, the arena, the bikini-clad girls, the crowd (he doubled it in the telling, four hundred, maybe five), his approach, his mid-flight wave to the crowd. The height of his jump, almost over-shooting the landing (another lie), the moment of confusion when he realized his foot was still on the accelerator.

  The crowd springing to its feet. (This was true, though their reason for standing was not fully explored in this version of the story.) His struggle to get his boot off before it was so tight it had to be cut off at the hospital, the pain. He was about to describe how they carried him to the microphone so he could address the crowd when suddenly he felt he was losing his audience, their eyes drifting to a spot above and behind his head.

  His voice trailed off as he turned in his chair to see them through the screen door: Trudy and Mercy. There they were. The blackbird trilled and the rushes swayed at the shore of the bay. The warm late-afternoon sun was strong behind them, so that they were only shadows. Dark silhouettes brightly haloed by the glittering light.

  Because you can only do some things for so long

  It took him just a beat too long to say something, to invite them in.

  “You said we should come, so we came.” She was belligerent, gorgeous. And he was so tired.

  The truth was that Jules had had enough. He suffered. Lord, he suffered. He had broken so many bones so many times, he could barely get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes he could actually hear his joints creaking.

  Pain, hu
miliation, brushes with death. No fame and not much glory.

  Once he had been making a jump at a town fair, and he had run out of gas on the take-off ramp. That’s how broke he had been. The car tipped off the end of the ramp and fell heavily onto the cars below with an inglorious metallic crunch.

  Once he sped off a ramp, and somehow the car rolled in the air, landing on its roof on the ground. The car had crumpled like tinfoil around him. He was trapped. Sitting there helpless, losing consciousness, he could smell gas.

  Then, he heard someone suggest using a torch to cut him out of the car.

  This will be it, he thought, killed by stupid ideas heaped on top of stupid ideas. He had been very surprised to wake up alive and only slightly damaged. They had managed to pull him out without blowing him to pieces. He still had dreams about it sometimes: the smell of gas, the voices, the rasp of the lighter.

  A few more car rallies and county fairs and then one massive jump. If he made it, he would be set: talk shows, merchandise, maybe even movies. If he didn’t make it, well, his worries would still be over.

  Because if he didn’t make it, he really wouldn’t make it. That much seemed obvious.

  Mark told Mercy and Trudy to sit down, and he went to the fridge. One ginger ale, one beer. Jules saw Trudy eyeing his cast. “I’m almost thirty.” He just blurted it out. “I can’t do this for much longer.”

  “You’re what?” said Trudy. He could see the look in her eyes: Thirty. Christ. Then she said it. “I didn’t think you were that old.”

  “I feel a hundred.” Jules smiled a very small smile. His head was pounding. It was the truth. He felt at least one hundred years old.