Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

Is that right, he said. He was chewing something, gum most likely, and his eyes covered the truck cabin like a sheet blowing this way and that on a line. I waited for him to finish. He had probably spent twenty minutes and more standing before I appeared on the horizon and he wanted to make some conversation out of it, seeing as the next driver might still be a town away. Nevertheless I decided that my best words at this point should be stuffed with plenty of nothing else to say between them.

Can you contact us if you hear anything out of the ordinary? We’ve had reports.

I will.

He looked up and saw me watching him.

And you have a book, he said.

I looked down to the sonnets on my lap, the list of Shakespeare words folded inside.

In case I have a few minutes in the café between errands, I said.

What’s it about, he said.

It’s a book of sonnets. Poetry that is.

He pursed his mouth. What’s your favorite poem then?

At that second the wind blew in a burst of snow, a few flakes, and dusted the seat with them. His question was thoughtful and not one that could be answered lightly, even if the circumstances, as they did now, required it, since people who ask questions for a living or out of habit take offense when those questions are left unanswered.

I like them all, it depends.

On what?

On what the day brings.

I decided it was time to go or for him to ask me to get out of the truck. I turned the key and the engine ran. He glanced at the seat again and coughed.

It occurred to me that he might ask to search the car and would find the Enfield and sight I’d hidden behind the seat. An impulse had me place them there instead of on the seat as usual, lucky for me.

He stepped back and put both hands on his gun belt.

So if I asked you to get out of the vehicle and stand there, he pointed down beside his boots, you wouldn’t be able to recite me a couple of lines and call it your favorite poem.

I did not like his sudden tone with me.

I said, For most days I would be able, but not as a rule for all days, speaking louder above the engine hum. In any case I was not good at quoting anything beyond a few short words, not having the capacity for such feats of mind.

He separated his feet to shoulder width and shrugged. If this were a planned stop and they’d been waiting for me I was a sitting duck and would not survive a gun draw. He’d fire on me at close range as I was grappling for the rifle behind me, an awkward death. I placed my foot on the pedal and handled the gear stick into first.

We have ourselves a man of letters, he said and smiled, looked to his side, the direction I was going in.

Thank you for your cooperation.

I was being sent away. That was fortunate for me. I drove off with a wave and watched him all the way along the straight past of the road till he was a man shrunk once more to a small mark shrouded in engine smoke on the side mirror. Then I wondered why I hadn’t seen a police car, not even parked off the road where there wouldn’t even be space for one, and since under no circumstances had he walked out here, they must have dropped him off. But that made no sense either.

After the first bend I pulled over and took the rifle from the back and laid it out on the seat. I considered the situation as the truck chugged and flakes blew across the hood. If they were closing in then I must act. I could turn around and shoot him from almost anywhere, but if he had been dropped off there to do a checkpoint such a shooting would invite that much more attention as the search for him began. In any case he had certainly not killed my dog of late and so I had no quarrel with him. Still I decided to think about it some more seeing as he had moved into this part of the world: I took the rife out of the cloth and walked to the side of the truck out of sight of a passing car and farther to the bend. But now the man was not standing where I left him. That was fairly quick of him. I waited a few minutes just in case he was relieving himself, went for the book and opened it where I had a leaf inserted, a poem about love and such matters, and sat by the wheel with the rifle perched.

The wind swept up the snow a field away and rolled past a moose standing still. A large high bird curved and straightened out in the bluster, eyes steady on some creature no doubt: their eyesight burned the impurities from ordinary vision and presented them with the smallest movement, the tiniest flicker, even the intent of a snow rabbit or small owl to cover an open stretch across the white, its last run.

When I got back to the bend with the rifle inside my coat I saw two red dots pulling up over the hill a good mile off, the tail lights of a car. He had been picked up, but going in a different direction, the back roads. Then it was clear, they were setting up checkpoints at unusual places to pare down to a final point, closing in on the whereabouts of the killer. Or the point was them sticking a pin on the map of the county and hoping. I toyed with idea of a fast shot, a mile about, not out of the question, but hardly time for two shots. And there’d be no hiding two men anyway, never mind a car off a narrow road.

I left the rifle back in its cloth on the seat and set off again. In addition to the book and the weapon I had brought an index card and pencil, a kind of bait, for I had not forgotten that there was a writer in Fort Kent who had plenty to say to me evidently.

I DROVE THE LONG WAY AND THE ONLY WAY IN WINTER, through the towns of Fort Kent and Frenchville, then south to St. Agatha, passing the slow trucks that spread salt and ploughed the snow aside, their wipers and headlights on. The entire sky had fallen and collapsed into sludge. You could lose the place where the sun hung on a day like this except for the wind that herded the clouds from occasional patches

The weather forecasters down in Bangor always point to Caribou on the map and refer to it as “up there,” but that town is forty miles south of us, and we are also a good four hours north of Montreal. Fort Kent is the most north you can live in the continental United States and be in any town: people hanging their washing in long back yards can see the televisions flickering in the living rooms of people in Saint Clair, New Brunswick. If that isn’t enough you can also speak French all day long if you want, even the English in you has run out by the time you make it this far. A small few thousand year-rounders live here, and the main street twists along a few restaurants, banks, a supermarket, building supply store, auto shop, pharmacy, a motel, and then opens out on both sides west into the wider Saint John Valley, the fields and the forest, the road following the river turn for turn, like dancers. I stopped at a station off the highway. A logging truck maneuvered in the parking area, and two men in red gear and flannel shirts held steaming coffee by the wall outside the restaurant where it was warmer, especially now that some blue had broken out briefly in the sky.

I passed them with a nod.

It’ll melt now, one of them said to me, for the day and some of tomorrow.

Expect so, I said, and entered, felt the blast of hot air and the smell of more hot coffee and fried bacon. I did not want much, some tea and a cheese sandwich. The restaurant was busy, and this morning, hours after the first snowfall, the snowboarders no doubt soon arriving, though not as many as in parts south and west, and the place would fill with noisy families, not the hard men and women who sat here today, the ones with long journeys fixed permanently in their eyes, the long-distance men.

A very light snow from the cloudy part of the sky brushed the air and swept the parking area as a truck drove in with antlers attached. Two men got out and walked in, thick arms, caps down to cigarettes without smoke. They eased into their table and made their orders with a nod. Snatches of their talk drifted through the clang of cutlery and the orders, the coughing and sneezing, the drone of the television up on the wall unit: