Travelling Light by Peter Behrens Read Free Book Online Page B

Green’s father was determined to find coal. It was a very bright, very cold winter day, ten degrees below zero at noon, white smoke licking from furnace pipes, snow in heaps. The sky was electric blue, the river had frozen. They kept driving through the unfamiliar part of the city, looking for a coal yard — Green’s father had been told about a place somewhere off Upper Lachine Road, or maybe Boulevard Saint-Jacques. They heard on the radio news that a pack of wolves had crossed the river and were frisking on the runways at the international airport.
    â€œAnything you want to talk to me about?” When he said this, Green’s father was leaning over the steering wheel, scanning unfamiliar street signs. “Anything at all?”
    Green said there wasn’t.
    Then his father asked him to check to see if there was a city map in the glovebox. Green unfolded the map and they kept searching for the coal yard without finding it. Then Green’s father nosed the car into a parking space burrowed out of a snowbank in front of a workingmen’s tavern on Saint-Antoine Street and asked Green if he would like to have a beer.
    Green had never been inside a tavern before. There was a slag of orange sawdust on the hardwood floor and men sat alone at small tables, reading tabloid newspapers and sipping slender glasses of beer. The television screen mounted in one corner showed a blank green eye. It would be switched on for the Saturday night hockey game, nothing else.
    In those days, in the province of Quebec, women by law were not allowed into taverns. His father ordered them each a glass of beer and showed Green how to sprinkle salt on the beer, to bring up the head. Green wondered if the entire outing had been carefully planned, if his father had been looking forward all week to this first glass of beer with his son, this little ceremony of masculine initiation.
    Green understood he was supposed to put away the summer, forget it. That made sense. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to.
    In her only letter, Maggie had written I wish we could do the things we used to do and I hope your mama doesn’t read this. I’m going to Europe next summer. I’m going to wear sandals & smoke Gauloises & sip absinthe & be lonely .
    After they finished their glasses of beer, Green and his father got back into the car and kept driving up and down streets lined with three-storey tenements and steep iron staircases plastered with ice and snow. They finally found the coal yard in what had been the stable yard of an ancientfarmhouse, now tucked between the concrete piers of an elevated expressway. While the roar of traffic stroked the air like a rasp, Green’s father purchased six fifty-pound sacks of coal, which fitted neatly into the trunk of his Pontiac.
    Green never heard another word or read another line from Maggie. Other lines in his life have crossed, occasionally sparking, blowing fuses, but she stays apart from all that. Her ghost is pure, and savage.
    She’s like the scent of burning coal. These days, when Green, on his travels, smells burning coal — it might be on a winter’s day in Cork — the scent seems to enter him, not as an ordinary sensation, pleasant or unpleasant, but as love enters the body, or stringent loneliness, or awareness of being lost without bearings. The scent of burning coal possesses him, for a few seconds at least, and everything mixes together, past and future, but mostly past, and in those few seconds, it all comes at him, all at once — he feels it squeezing his lungs, but he has learned to keep breathing.

RICH KID
    They used to meet beneath the electric crucifix on Mount Royal. She sold roses and carnations from table to table at sidewalk cafés on Rue Saint-Denis, and she would tell the boy, “Meet me sous la croix . Bring a blanket and something nice to drink.” In those summer nights he trusted her more than he would later, but not enough so