Travelling Light by Peter Behrens Read Free Book Online Page A

assembled, painted, and decaled plastic Messerschmitts and Spitfires, suspending the tiny planes on nylon thread with puffs of cotton wool to simulate an anti-aircraft barrage. He stole fine white sand from the sandboxes in Pointe Claire Park for his invasion beaches.
    He had not anticipated the power of sex, the authority it would exercise over his happiness.
    Whenever they slept together, his self-consciousness eased. He felt closer to a line of balance, almost graceful. He had grown four inches during the previous year and was so unaccustomed to his height that he could trip and fall over while walking on a smoothly clipped lawn. Maggie made him feel powerful. When they were sleeping together, she made him feel he had radiance in the world.
    â€œSleeping together” — they did not sleep much. During sex he was always hyper-awake. Afterwards they usually couldn’t fall asleep without the risk of getting caught. Sleeping happened only on those weekends when both sets of parents were away.
    The first time he slept with her in his bedroom he awoke before dawn, startled to feel her presence. She wore one of his shirts, nothing else. It had been a warm night and the sheets were bunched at the foot of the bed. She lay on her back. Her heat impressed him. He found himself studying the patch of fur between her legs. His own pubic hair was sparse; hers was thick. In the moonlight he could not tell its colour, but it gleamed. It could almost be blue, he thought. He ran his fingertips lightly through her bush and she stirred but did not awaken, and he fell back to sleep with his hand cupping her there. In the morning they had sex again, then she showed him how to make coffee using his mother’s percolator.
    At the end of summer Maggie went back to Boston and the School of Fine Rats, and a couple of months later her father was transferred from Montreal to Vancouver. The house with the gun slits in the basement went up for sale. Green got the news in a letter from Boston that he reread a dozen times and eventually lost; he was still too young to be able to hold on to such things, to value scraps of paper. One afternoon in October, on his way home from school, he went by the Harrisons’ house and peered in through a window and saw the rooms were bare. A realtor’s sign was plunged into the lawn. The Harrisons had already moved on.
    Maggie had first brought him back to the fur-trade house after a Friday night dance by the club pool, when her parents were in La Jolla, or Santa Barbara, or Phoenix.
    It was dark and she had tripped over a sprinkler while crossing the lawn. He remembers her small, fierce shout, like an animal snagged in a leg trap. He knelt down beside her on the grass. She was rubbing her big toe. There was a pungent aroma of chemical fertilizer and pine needles composting. She had placed her hand over his heart and looked straight at him, unsmiling. He was unaccustomed to such focused attention from anyone and it was hard not to look away. There was intensity in her gaze that he had never encountered before, also a coolness. She was looking at him, and seeing him.
    For about a minute they stayed like that on the lawn, motionless. Then she got up without a word and he followed her inside.
    About five months after Green last saw Maggie, he and his father were driving through an unfamiliar section of Montreal on a Saturday afternoon in January. Green’s father was searching for a yard he had heard about that still sold bags of fireplace coal. Cordwood was available everywhere, and cheap, but Green’s father had a nostalgic longing for the resiny aroma of coal smoke and the hissing, clinking noise of coals glowing in a grate.
    But coal was hard to find. They had already tried two or three yards where split hardwood was selling for only eleven dollars per cord, delivered, but at each yard the foreman claimed they hadn’t sold coal for years. “ Depuis dix ans, peut-être! ”
    But