We pulled into that northern Ontario town around 11 o’clock at night. There was hardly a streetlight lit and the one traffic light flashed a passive yellow. It had been a long drive from Montreal and we were hungry.
“I think we are SOL my friends,” I said, stopping at the light to take in the town in all directions. With both windows open, a hot summer wind moved through the truck. Jeff groaned in the backseat. Beside me, Kris lit a cigarette. Kris and I were used to the driving - this was actually our return trip to the West Coast. Kris, with her wild red curls, was my sister and had come along for the ride; she was the one who had written “what a long strange trip it’s been” in the dust of our back window.
We had driven out in a borrowed Chevy truck to pick up the remnants of my student life in Montreal. I had just been given the piece of paper I had strived for four long years - I was officially a graduate of the McGill faculty of Anthropology. “Anthropology, what is that?” my mother had asked; she never came to my graduation. But I was packing all my papers home, my examinations of the injustices of other cultures. And amongst all that paper was the “Equality McGill” club banner my roommate and I had stayed up making one night, high on idealism and BC bud. We never did get any other members.
I pulled the rearview mirror. I could see my long dark hair, braided under my cowboy hat, and my dark eyes, slightly pouchy with fatigue.
“No whining from you,” I said looking past me in the mirror to my buddy Jeff. He caught a ride with us out of Montreal heading to Vancouver in an attempt to hook up with a woman named Tree. Tree was the reason we hadn’t stopped yet that day. “Where do we go from here?”
That’s when we saw him.
“Can you spare some change?” The guy had shuffled out of the darkness. He was native, dressed in a clean white t-shirt and dark blue jeans. His skin was smooth. I could smell alcohol on his breath.
“Sure man,” Jeff said, shuffling in the back seat, then reaching his arm out the window and handing the guy a loonie. “Heh, do you know where we can get something to eat in this town?”
“Ya, the Denny’s is still open. You drive straight then turn right…I could show you.” I looked at Kris who shrugged. Jeff slid over behind her in the backseat. I got out of the truck and pushed the seat forward to let the guy in.
“What’s your name?” Jeff asked as we started off under the guy’s direction.
“Joe,” he said.
Jeff introduced us, offered Joe a cigarette and lit it for him. He hadn’t finished that cigarette before we got to Denny’s.
“Thanks for the smoke guys,” Joe said as he started walking away from the truck, from us, from the restaurant.
We stood looking at him a minute before Kris said, “Why don’t you come in and have something to eat?”
“No, I shouldn’t”
“How about a coffee?” I asked.
“No, I really shouldn’t.”
“C’mon,” Jeff said. Joe looked at us and then at the restaurant reluctantly.
“I guess, but only if you take me back to the highway with you later.”
“It’s a deal.”
“Table for three?” The hostess asked as she looked us up and down, grabbing brown and yellow menus from the rack.
“For four,” Jeff corrected her. She grabbed another menu.
We walked towards our table. There were three other tables of people in the restaurant at that hour. At first they were indistinguishable in their jeans and t-shirts, except that every one of them was staring at us. I felt that I was on stage, the Denny’s orange and yellow a backdrop for some drama. It took a long time to get to our table; we moved in slow motion. I looked again and saw that all of the people at one table were native. All of the people at the other tables were not.
We sat down, people still looking at us, and tried to focus on our menus and our hunger.
“What are you going to have, Joe?” I said as I perused the dinner selections.
“Nothing, I don’t think I should have anything.”
“Don’t you want anything?” Kris asked, looking up from her menu.
“Coffee, I guess,” Joe said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. I noticed that the other Denny’s patrons had returned to their own conversations.
The waitress came back and asked Kris what she would have. Then she asked Jeff what he would have. Then she asked me. Then, she started to leave.
“My friend will have a coffee,” I said audibly. Everyone looked at us again. The waitress grimaced but wrote Joe’s coffee down.
“What’s going on here, Joe?” Jeff asked in a loud whisper so as not to be overheard.
“People don’t mix much around here,” Joe said, looking down at his hands.
“What do you mean?”
“The Indians and the Whites.”
“Why not?”
Joe shrugged, “they just don’t.”
Back in the truck, staring at the blinking yellow light, we all sat quiet for a minute. We had coaxed Joe back to the truck by telling him we’d drop him off on the highway. But now we weren’t quite ready to part ways.
“Is there somewhere we can go? We’ve got some beer in the back. We could have one for the road.” Jeff smiled.
Joe looked at him, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “We could go to the park…”
I pulled my sleeve down over my hand and used it to twist the cap off the bottle I held. The first sip was cold, and bitter and delicious. We shared our backgrounds. Joe said he was an artist. “I’ll send you some of my stuff,” he said. We each cracked another beer. We took turns taking pictures, arms around each other, beers in hand. We talked about our families. Joe told us about his three kids, pulled out pictures from his wallet. He was proud of each child; he groaned about each one.
Kris and I groaned about our parents, “But Mom leant us the truck, and Dad’s footing the gas bill, so I guess they can’t be all bad,” I admitted.
“We’re lucky,” Kris said.
“Bloody spoiled,” Jeff pointed out.
“That’s what parents are for,” Joe said. He looked at his feet, quiet. Then his face fell.
“What’s the matter, Joe?” Jeff said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Who are you guys?” He asked, clearing his throat and looking down. We looked at each other.
“Just your average Canadians,” Jeff said, attempting a joke.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. We stood and listened. We could hear the sound of the big trucks on the highway.
“My wife…my kids…” Joe’s voice trailed off. He tried again, “My wife…. She was always so strong, strong with life. And now she’s in the hospital with cancer. She hasn’t been sick that long, but she doesn’t look good and I don’t want the kids to see her. But I have to tell them. Tonight, when you found me, I wanted to ….”
We were quiet for a few minutes.
“That’s tough, Joe,” Kris said. Joe took a slow breath.
None of us knew what to say, so we didn’t say anything. Instead, we sat, the four of us on the tailgate of the truck, leaning on each other. Jeff passed around his pack of Du Maurier. Finally, Joe stood up, stood straight.
The horizon had started to lighten though it was only about 4AM.
“You guys probly better get going,”
“Are you going to be okay?” I said, standing, giving him a squeeze.
He nodded. “Heh, if you guys keep in touch, I could get you some status cards,” he joked.
“Where can we take you?”
“To the lights, I guess.”
Later, we drove over the broken pavement of the Trans Canada Highway. The broken, the patched, the broken, the patched. The trees crowd alongside the road watching us.
“Status card?” asked the guy at the service station in another northern town.
“Huh?” I asked, not understanding his question.
“Do you got a status card?” he asked, a little too slowly. He was young and blonde. He kept trying to wipe his hands on his stained plaid shirt.
“No, I don’t,” I said, a little too slowly and trying to catch his eye.
He grunted, and never did look at me. But as I watched at him in the side mirror, I swear he shot Kris and Jeff a dark look, just before walking away.
Catherine Dawn Johnson is a writer from British Columbia.