Travelling, and a Model 36
By Nigel Lemieux
Part I: North York to Denver
Frenchy and I drove to Colorado in the faded black Ford pickup from the sixties, with its red upholstery and yellow trim that my cashed college fund paid for. Nights were still hot, so we laid in the truck-bed and fell asleep there together watching the stars and each other, with my feet hanging off the tailgate. It was beautiful; still comfortable, just being there with her at the distance between where we’d left and where we were going. Before we fell asleep she told me she didn’t think ‘love’ was a good enough word to describe how she felt about me.
I was more in love with her than she was with me. I tried to deny it but she was telling me that night in the back of my truck that she didn’t see me the way I saw her. We met when she was twelve. She was my best friend for two years before we started dating, and that only happened when I told her that I couldn’t be her friend if she couldn’t be more. She loved me as a friend, but elected to take me as more.
I was eighteen that summer, and she was sixteen. We’d been dating two years, but didn’t have sex until five months after my ultimatum. When we did, we fell into something more real than love; if only lust. Whatever it was, it held us together through those two years.
We were going to visit Frenchy’s friend Maddison who left Durham, North Carolina a few months before she did. Frenchy came to Toronto with her family running from American immigration policies, and Maddison moved into a loft with her dad in Denver, running from his dead wife. This happened four years ago, and they fell out of touch until a year before we planned our trip. We weren’t staying with her and her dad, we just used her being there as an excuse to get as far away as possible where one of us knew anyone. We brought money for a motel. Colorado sounded good. My world before the trip was small, having only ever known my uptown neighbourhood and downtown Toronto; and for eight months, my dad’s repurposed farmhouse an hour north of Montréal.
Frenchy’s hair was plain brown dyed blonde and clip-in extensions. Cheap green contacts covered the honey coloured eyes behind them. I liked both more the way they were before, when I met her. I liked her face more without makeup but it didn’t stop her from wearing it either.
In the four years we’d known each other I watched her evolve into someone different than I fell in love with, but I held onto all the feelings.
––
We left my apartment in the east end of North York before sunrise. She’d stayed over the night before so we could leave early. We wanted to be on the highway going somewhere fast, but she made me stop at the McDonald’s drive-thru before we left town.
“What do you want?” she asked after she ordered.
“Nothing babe, I ate before we left my place.”
“No you didn’t.”
I didn’t say anything. She ordered a large Coke Zero and an extra hash-brown for me with her McMuffin and apple juice. She ate the second hash-brown knowing that I wouldn’t.
––
We were on the road by nine o’clock driving toward Michigan. We drove through Detroit, and skimmed Indiana along the lake to Illinois. We stopped in Chicago for food and drinks and the city. It was overcast and miserable. We were on our way back from lunch at some diner in a bad part of town and saw someone punching my window with a red bandana-wrapped fist, trying to break it.
I walked toward him and asked what he was doing. He turned around startled and swung his fist through empty air. I was further away than he thought. I followed his steps as he recoiled backward, away from the truck in fear I’d retaliate. He was a kid.
“Don’t you know where the fuck you are, motherfucker?” he asked me, when he found his testicles –– his voice sounded like they hadn’t quite dropped yet. “This is Chiraq, nigga. Fuck you expect?”
“Just get the fuck out of here.”
Frenchy watched from behind me.
“Says who?” he asked with a shining hood-rat’s grin, swaggering toward us groping himself to signal his halfcocked crotch.
“Show it to me.”
He licked his lips and broke eye contact with a one-syllable laugh. “Fuck you, nigga. I don’t show it ‘til I blow it.” He didn’t have a gun. “Show me what the fuck you packin’, thinkin’ you hip as fuck in your tight-ass ripped jeans and white-ass tee. Get yo’ bitch the fuck home ‘fore something happens to her.” He eyed Frenchy and licked his lips again.
She took the gun my grandpa gave me from the back of my faded jeans’ waistband, and walked toward the truck pointing the loaded five-shooter at the kid. He was just a kid.
“What the fuck are you doing, Frenchy? Give me that.” I took it out of her hands and put it back, adjusting my shirt over it looking around and back at him. We were alone. “Get in the truck,” I told her, and threw the keys.
She got in and started the engine from the passenger’s side of the bench.
I walked between the kid and the driver’s side door. “Run along, now,” I said to fuck with him.
He started to ease away in a vague scared or pissed-off daze. I thought he was going to try to hit me again by the look on his face, but he didn’t.
I got in and rolled down the window. “It wasn’t locked.” I didn’t usually fuck with people so much, but something about him assaulting my truck and threatening my girl brought it out of me.
Frenchy climbed over me as we were driving away. “Don’t you know where you are? Chiraq, motherfucker. Find a fucking gun.”
His shouting back at us trailed off as we started toward Missouri.
—
“You’re going to like her. You’re actually going to fucking love her.”
“No I’m not. You’re the love of my life,” I said trying not to come off clingy –– I was still so in love with a memory. “Can you leave your shoes on, babe?”
“Nooooo, I’m so comfy!” She sprawled out more, and kicked her bare feet up on the dash.
“I fucking hate feet,” but I didn’t mind hers and she knew that. Hers were the only ones I could stand, just because they were hers.
“Oli, it’s a shit-box with a yellow dashboard. How much worse are my feet going to make it?” She wasn’t really asking.
I hated when she called me ‘Oli’. She didn’t move them, just smirked and turned to look out the window.
––
We stopped again near Springfield, Illinois for gas and more food for Frenchy. I drove through the rest of the afternoon to Kansas City, where we slept for a while in the back of the truck. I woke Frenchy up at around eight that night, popping pills to wake myself up, and drove for six hours until we we passed a town called Goodland, close to the Colorado state line. I stopped for gas, and woke her up from the sleep that music coming through the mostly white noise stereo lulled her back into.
“We’re here!”
“Almost. We’ll cross the Colorado state line in a bit.”
“What the fuck … asshole … I was having the best dream. I think it was good. It was you and me in the back of the truck like last night and we were listening to my iPod and watching all the stars …”
“Yeah.”
“ … but you were telling me that you were sorry for everything you did. Then I told you that you didn’t do anything but you said you did but you wouldn’t tell me what it was … then you were sitting with your back toward the front of the truck … like … you know? And my head was on your lap and you were looking down at me.” She was still half asleep.
I smiled, looking at the road as we pulled away from gas station.
“But I was crying. Then I told you that I forgive you for what you did, but I didn’t know what it was … or I did in the dream … did you tell me? I don’t know … it’s whatever.”
I looked over at her wondering what I could’ve done, but she already had her head back against the window and was looking out of it. We sat through the awkward silences between radio frequencies and didn’t talk about the dream again. She was awake now and asked if she could drive for a bit because she was bored.
I pulled over, and put my hands over my eyes to rub them and make sure they could still close. Pills still had me wired so I took a few Xanax to knock me out until we got to Denver.
––
I slept for three hours, and woke up to her shrieking and opening the door; running toward Maddison and pouncing on her. I leaned over to turn off the engine, took the key out of the ignition and opened the door to get out. I shut it behind me and walked around the back to close the other. The sound of the second door slam snapped them out of the frenzy and I introduced myself to her. She looked at me with the darkest eyes I had ever seen and told me her name was Maddison, but I didn’t hear her. She turned and ran her hand back through her dark brown hair as she walked up the fire escape. There was something behind her eyes I didn’t recognize through the Xanax haze –– if I did it was from too long ago to matter. I couldn’t decide if they were black or just dark grey.
I took our duffle-bags from the truck-bed, and we followed her up the rusting black stairs to her dad’s floor. Maddison told us we could stay with her because her dad left at the last minute for five days. He didn’t say where he was going.
—
Maddison’s relationship with her dad had been abysmal since her mom died before she moved to Denver. She was itching to leave him and Colorado behind, but she was sixteen and couldn’t find a good enough job to support herself. She had no money or things of value. Her dad didn’t give a fuck about her, and would probably have paid her to leave if she were eighteen –– she’d been holed up in her room bong-smoking her summer days away. Her brother, who was home from college for four months, was the real prize anyway. She didn’t bother her dad, so he tolerated her –– she always blew the pot smoke out her window. He wouldn’t wonder where she went if she disappeared, or try to find her. He was impartial to her existence. Maybe that made her the way she was, and gave her that ‘something’ behind her eyes.
—
Frenchy had been in love with Maddison’s brother since they all lived in Durham together, and went to the same schools. He was my age. She stumbled around him, and choked on every word she said to him. She told me when we first met, that she loved him –– that if she could combine her favourite parts of all the people she knew, he would be the product.
I saw what she meant about him –– seeing him it seemed like they’d evolved together into a subspecies I didn’t belong to. They both wore the seasonal beach-chic bullshit that I couldn’t objectively stand. I liked things more simple –– tight destroyed jeans in black or faded blue and simple, usually white shirts. Red Chucks or black Vans and a brown belt.
He worked out every second day and I did pushups and situps, sometimes. He drank protein-shakes if not steroids, and ate meat and potatoes –– I didn’t eat meat; rarely anything at anything at all. My body kept slender muscle-tone, but Frenchy gawked at butch Abercrombie boys and they gawked back at her ‘beach babe’ anatomy.
I noticed they looked good together when they were catching up on the past four years, but that was in the past and I was comfortable knowing I’d won. While they were catching up, Maddison and I didn’t say much to each other –– mostly small talk, mostly about Frenchy. There was tension I couldn’t explain.
—
Our second night at her dad’s place, we threw a party with her brother’s college friends and wrecked the house. When everyone left Maddison and I walked around trying to find Frenchy and assessing damages as best our still-drunken, stoned selves could. We opened the door to her brother’s bedroom, and found Frenchy riding her “old love’s” dick like a fucking cowgirl on speed.
I stood in the doorway staring until the familiar sounds from her lips got through the block to my brain and I closed the door. Maddison was looking at me with those eyes and a hand over her mouth, wanting to ask me something but not knowing what to ask. I smiled for her and went outside. I paced for minutes that seemed like the hours they turned into. I smoked cigarettes and watched stars from the back of the truck where we laid days ago, and considered leaving her and my duffle to drive anyplace but there.
—
The sky was a black-purple gradient when I got into the truck and turned the key in the ignition. It cranked to life and the headlights came on as Frenchy walked down the stairs struggling with both our bags. I made sure not to look at her. She walked around the side to the back and threw them into the box, and then back to the door and opened it. She got in. I looked at a girl who wasn’t Frenchy and saw what I then decided were ‘graphite’ eyes looking back at me. I smiled for real this time.
“Why’d you bring her bag? She’s not coming with me.”
“The other one’s mine.”
I stared at her not knowing what to say. She interrupted a thousand thoughts when she asked where we were going with a smile on her face that told me everything was going to be alright –– a feeling I never had with anyone else. Maybe it was love that felt so familiar and far away, when I saw her the day before. And maybe she felt it as well. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe that was all a mistake and maybe I should have gone back home. Maybe I only wanted it to be love because that’s what I thought I had lost that night.
I said nothing; my mind too busy with the ‘maybes’ for my lips to move.
“California it is.”
She grabbed my beer-soaked white V-neck and crossed the bench toward me, looking at me and down at my lips. She kissed me as if she was kissing this life goodbye.
We drove toward the mountains.
