Bad Ideas Read online

  North, north.

  Field after field. Birds chirping. Crickets making noise. The grassy field soft and springy beneath his wet work boots. Then through the pines into the clearing before the crunch of the gravel beside the railway tracks. Fenton bent down and placed a hand on the metal rail. It was warm from the sun even though the air was a bit cool. It was smooth and quiet and still. He stepped into the middle of the tracks and sat down, cross-legged. Then he laid down flat on his back.

  With one hand on each rail, he looked up at the blue sky. Bright white feathery wisps of clouds. The crickets sang and the grass made a whispery dry brushing sound. The high tops of the pines seemed to sway dark against the blue sky. He could feel it coming. The softest subtlest vibration in his fingertips. So soft, so subtle, it might not be real. Just a watery ripple in the clear late afternoon air.

  He loved it. The feeling that filled him. Bliss. The weakness in his knees, the trembling of the ground, the black wings folding inward, blocking the light. He was sinking. He was fading away.

  Fenton forced his eyes open but could see nothing. White light. The trembling hum loud in his ears. He forced himself up on his elbows, tucked the toe of his boot under the outside of the rail, and rolled himself over onto the gravel. He could feel the stones through his shirt, sharp against his chest. He pushed his boot against the rail and he rolled down the gravel bank, tumbling down the slope until he was lying under the pines. A bed of needles beneath him.

  And he was gone, gone.

  Out for the count.

  By the time Fenton opened his eyes, rolled over onto his knees, and stood up, brown pine needles dropping off the back of his shirt, the train was long gone. The spectacular rush of earth-quaking car after car blurring by, the screech of metal on metal, was over. There was only a faint rumbling echo in the distance, a lonely throb in the air far, far away. He was a stiff scarecrow standing in a field. A shadow in the twilight.

  His headache followed him all the way home.

  Because the impossible is not the possible

  Tammy’s throat was sore, her voice hoarse from shouting. Tears were drying on her cheeks as she swept the kitchen floor, the strokes of the broom getting less effective, more violent, until she lost control completely and threw the broom at the wall. She looked around for something else to throw, something to break, but stopped herself. She stood, hands on hips, breathing hard and shaking her head at the universe, at life. Terrified, Fenton slipped out the back door, pulling his jacket on as he took the back steps two at a time, jogging down the alley. He would come back later when the air had cleared. Bearing milk and tea bags. Some cookies if he had enough cash. Peace offerings to the furious power inhabiting his home.

  She watched him through the kitchen window, trotting across the parking lot. Scooting away with his tail between his legs. Fenton Osborne. The latest in a relatively long line of utterly confounding men inhabiting Tammy’s bed. Not for the first time she wondered what exactly it was she wanted from him. What she had ever wanted from men. It seemed to her that men were always so certain about what they wanted. In her experience, anyway, it was usually something simple. And stupid.

  They wanted you to take your clothes off slowly and walk toward them. Or walk away from them. To leave your shoes on, leave your bra on, your pantyhose, whatever. They wanted you to look at them or not to look at them.

  To talk or not to say a word.

  To touch them or stop touching them.

  To kneel or bend over.

  Whatever it was, it was usually enunciated clearly and easily done.

  But what did she want? Mostly, she wanted to be loved and left alone. Not sequentially, but simultaneously. In equal measure. Love me. And leave me the fuck alone. It made her feel itchy, swarmed, irritated most of the time.

  Fenton, ever accommodating, just wanted what she wanted. Whatever it could possibly be. Mostly, he wanted peace, which was not available. What had he done this time to get himself in so much trouble? He had made a simple suggestion. He had just pointed out that since they both had steady jobs and now that they were settled in this ground-floor apartment that backed onto an alley, Mercy could come and stay with them sometimes. Maybe just on weekends.

  Five, four, three, two, one.

  Tammy had detonated. Wept. Cursed. Fenton had scooted out the door. The broom had hit the wall. The shit, the fan. Et cetera. Poor Fenton. He had guessed wrong again.

  It would not stop him from trying, though. He was nothing if not persistent.

  Poor old, sad old Fenton, winding through alleyways, buying milk and tea at the corner store, trying to cook up another scheme to make his woman happy, to make the impossible possible.

  Mercy

  Because nothing is ever quite the way you want it to be

  For the record, this is what Mercy thought. She thought that nothing was ever quite the way you wanted it to be. It could be close. But it was never right. She had Trudy and Grandma, but she wanted her mother. Or for her mother to be dead and Trudy to be her mother. She felt bad for thinking this, but she thought it sometimes anyway.

  She wanted people to listen to her. They did. But they always laughed. They never just listened and understood and answered back to her in a way that helped. She could never say things in a way that didn’t make grown-ups laugh.

  Mercy wanted to stay up late, to eat more candy, to do things by herself. She wanted her own room, but she was scared to be alone in the dark. She wanted there to be no such thing as dying, even if there was such a thing as God in Heaven.

  She wanted school to start in August, not September, so she could go sooner. She wanted to have long shining hair. Trudy’s hair was thick and dark and shiny and her ponytail was as thick as Mercy’s wrist. Like the tail of a real pony. Mercy’s hair was light brown, a little bit greyish like a mouse, and so thin that her ears poked through at the sides. When Trudy put Mercy’s hair back in a ponytail, it was a scraggly little mouse tail.

  For her birthday last year, she had asked for a purse, picturing herself walking around with Trudy’s big, slouchy brown leather bag over her shoulder, tossing her hair back, digging around in there for some gum or a nickel. (But not cigarettes. She was never going to smoke. The smell was awful.) But when she had opened her present from Grandma Claire, it was a tiny plastic pink-and-white purse. A toy purse. With a cartoon lamb on the front. It made her feel like a baby. But she still said thank you. She still climbed into her grandma’s lap and kissed her on the cheek. She still carried the purse around everywhere she went, put Chiclets and pennies and a tiny doll-mirror in there. A key she found along the side of the road. She pretended it was a little bit different, turned the lamb side toward her body so nobody could see it. She made do.

  In September, she would be five. She tried not to get her hopes up about presents.

  Mercy wanted everything to be right. She wanted everyone to be happy. She wanted the adults to pair off like dance partners, like in a fairy tale. Trudy should marry Jules. Trudy’s father should come home and marry Grandma Claire. Her mom should come home married to a rich prince who would buy them a big house with canopy beds and a swimming pool.

  They would have more puppies. And kittens. Both.

  She should be allowed to go to school right now. Today.

  And Jules should not be allowed to try to jump over the river in a car. She couldn’t understand why he wanted to do it. And she couldn’t understand why other people wanted him to do it. There was something mean about that. Cruel. Heartless is what Trudy said.

  But none of these things were up to Mercy. Nothing in the whole world was up to her. She was not in charge. She wanted to be in charge.

  Mercy wanted those white horses to have horns. Why shouldn’t they?

  Because dreams can march right into the daylight

  Jules was not in charge either. That much was clear. Things were not going according to pla
n.

  He needed three things to get this stunt done: a car, a ramp, himself. None was in good shape. All through the month of June, it had rained. It rained so much that a sort of lake had formed in the low-lying field alongside the ramp. By the end of the month, the mud was so deep that trucks had to be brought in to pull the tractors out, then bigger tractors had to be brought in to pull the trucks out. Construction came to a halt. Costs were out of control. Investors were pulling out. The TV people were getting nervous.

  On Dominion Day, about a thousand pounds of packed earth slid off the side of the ramp, revealing unmoored steel girders. The asphalt on top tore in two. The engineer was fired. The construction company declined to extend its contract. The jump was postponed. July 15th became August 19th.

  It was all slipping away from him now. Jules knew it. Before the TV deal, before the promoter got involved, Jules had been in charge. There hadn’t been much to be in charge of — a few small investors, a fake car, his own carnival sideshow patter — but the project had been his. Now arrangements were made by someone else. Decisions were taken without him. The promoter recruited investors, hired contractors, worked with the network to schedule interviews and appearances, set the date for the jump. And then cancelled it. And then set a new one.

  The only person Jules knew how to contact was Sammy Harrison, and he could never get a straight answer about Sammy. Did he work for the network? The promoter? Who was paying him? He had just started popping up one day, all feathered hair and smiles and tight T-shirts. He was everywhere. At the jump site, at press events. And now he was calling from Chicago, where the rocket car was being built. He had been talking to the head mechanic and test driver. Twice they had tested the car. Twice the gas tank had exploded. But they had it all figured out now. No need to worry. Sammy had everything under control. Next week, he said, Jules should be able to test drive it himself. Jules had never driven a rocket car before. Apparently, this one could go 270 miles an hour.

  The ramp was being rebuilt using as much of the existing materials as possible. There was a new engineer, a new construction company. A few days of sunshine, and the site was starting to dry up a little. He allowed himself to feel hope.

  Then one night, just a week before the new date, Jules went to the site and drove his car halfway up the ramp. The pavement was covered in cracks and patches. It was a mess. The ride was so bumpy it rattled his teeth. He put the car in park and sat there, leaning back into his seat, staring at the moon hanging in the sky like a yellow light bulb. A dark shadowy ring of black clouds surrounded it. Slowly shuttered around it, blotting out the light.

  He wasn’t surprised when Sammy called to deliver the news. The jump would have to be delayed again. Maybe to the end of September.

  Trudy was happy each time the jump was delayed — which was flattering — but she was in the minority in Preston Mills. Jules saw the way people looked at him. Like him, he supposed, they were starting to think the jump might never happen. That the whole thing was a hoax.

  When his cast came off, his ankle looked shrunken. The skin was shrivelled and white, and he seemed to have grown an extra layer of dark hair where the cast had been. It was disgusting.

  Limping through the grocery store one day, a boy called out to him. He was maybe twelve years old.

  “Hey! Jules Tremblay!”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re a fuckin’ chicken!” The kid ran off to join his friends on the sidewalk outside of the store, flapping his arms like wings. Laughing his head off.

  And Jules limped along behind his shopping cart like a sad old woman.

  (And he felt like he had had this dream before. This dream of being broken, deflated, unmanned in a grocery store. In a town full of strangers. This dream and the one about the crumpling of the hood and the crushing of bones, the smack of his helmet against the wheel and then the smell of gas. The rasp and click of the lighter. This and all the other bad endings or bad beginnings: the ramp sinking into the mud, leaning to the left, the rocket car exploding on a track in Chicago in a fluttering cloud of dollar bills.

  When he was a kid, he had dreams about his mother leaving him alone with his brothers. And his brothers leaving him alone in the street. Disappearing down alleyways like ghosts.

  Now, he dreamed of the water. He had dreams about the cold water of the St. Lawrence River bubbling green outside the windows of the car as it sank down, down, down. And the tentacles of a monster sliding black against the windshield, shutting out the light.

  And Jules thought, most of these things have already happened.

  One by one they have marched out of the dream world and into the daylight.)

  Because there is always someone eager to deliver bad news

  The following evening, a crew filmed Jules speaking at the Preston Mills Men’s Club. The club had invited him to talk about the jump at their monthly meeting. Jules brought a piece of bristol board covered with press clippings and photos of his past stunts, crowds cheering, cars flying through the air. And a poster-sized photo of the rocket car replica. (Jules wished he hadn’t enlarged the photo quite so much. You could see the gaps at the seams of the turbine where it was starting to come apart. If you looked close enough, you could see that the racing stripe was made of electrical tape.)

  Jules soldiered on. He talked about watching Lightning Jones on TV, jumping the fountain in Las Vegas on his motorcycle, and his boyhood dream of pulling off the greatest stunt of all time. How happy he had been to find such a perfect site for the jump in Preston Mills.

  When he finished his talk, a few of the men clapped. It sounded like the beginning of rain on a tin roof. Fat, occasional drops here and there. Slap. Pause. Slap, slap, slap. There was a shifting of chairs and a rumble of voices at the back of the room. Jules stood at the podium and waited for questions. The fluorescent lights flickered and hummed above.

  “Anybody?”

  At the back of the room, a big, burly wall of a man called Bill Puck leaned back in his chair and drummed his thick sausage fingers on the tabletop. Still seated, he yelled, “Hey, Tremblay!”

  Jules scanned the room until he identified the speaker, saw him there, sprawled in his chair. “Yes, sir?”

  “You and I have something in common.”

  “Really?” said Jules. “What’s that?”

  Giant Bill smiled a giant smile. “Neither one of us is ever gonna jump the goddamn St. Lawrence River in a fucking car.”

  Because you just keep making things up until they seem true

  The cameras, the cameras. They were making his life hell. The date was set again for September 23rd and everyone seemed confident that the ramp and the car would be ready. The machine was in motion. Jules was in Ottawa, filming a Wide World of Sports profile, “training” for the jump. Why Ottawa? Who knew. A prettier backdrop, maybe, and better hotels for the crew. Jules stubbed out his cigarette and jogged for the camera as it rolled backward on a trolley of some kind, and he lied about the need to stay in top physical condition in order to smash himself to bits in a car. (He was winded and his gait was lopsided. But never mind.)

  Then the producers had him in a kayak in the canal that wound through the city. Geese and ducks swam up to him, curious. He had insisted on a life jacket. There was something about the murkiness of the canal, the occasional flash of carp scales near the surface that unnerved him. The life jacket pushed up uncomfortably against his chin. The crew teased him, asked him if he was going to wear a life jacket on the day of the big jump. He grinned sweatily into the camera. Clearly they didn’t understand the plan. “I’m not gonna kayak across the river, fellas. I’m gonna fly.”

  Back in Preston Mills, they took him and Trudy in a boat to the island across from the ramp, his purported landing spot. (Although Jules talked about jumping over the river and the stunt was being marketed as “The Mile Jump,” the plan was to jump to an island in the middle of the ri
ver. It was not really a mile away from the shore. Probably half a mile. It was still preposterous.) He and a reporter sat on stumps on the island, tall grass waving around them, the water lapping against the shore. Trudy stood behind the cameramen. This was the first time she had seen him in promotion mode, performing for the cameras. He hoped he didn’t look like he felt: a bit off, a bit sick to his stomach.

  “Now, Jules, I can’t help but notice that there are a fair number of trees on this island. Are you worried about that?”

  “No. You see, we didn’t want to disturb the landscape here too much. The car I have can be steered in the air. State of the art. The steering wheel moves the wings, so I can actually be pretty precise. Plus there’s a parachute.”

  There was a long pause. The two men stared across the water at the ramp in the distance.

  “I was actually thinking of planting roses here.” Jules got up from his stump and gestured around himself, making a slow circle. He was making this up. But he liked it. He could see it in his mind. “You know, it would make the landing site easy to see from the air. And make a nice soft landing. A big long bed of red roses.”