Линн Коуди - Best Canadian Stories 2020

He did some stretches, rotated his torso to crack his vertebrae, and tried sitting on the hood, but the metal was too hot. He looked straight ahead, then behind, and even stared off into the interchange’s lower reaches where countless flashes of sunlight refracted off the windows of immobilized cars whose passengers had dispersed. Some had gathered next to trucks or buses, to enjoy what little shade these tall vehicles cast as the sun reached a few points beyond its zenith. He couldn’t see the cause of the gridlock. They were stuck here under a cloudless sky. There were no ambulances, no firemen, no road crews.

The woman in the car with the broken headlight got out and went over to the parapet to stare out at the city. Over the past couple hours he’d caught glimpses of her in his rear-view—standing behind her car looking for something in the trunk, or talking on her phone or to the people in the car behind her—but this time she was right there, just a few metres away from him. They did have the same glasses. Like him, she had hair so soaked with sweat it looked like she’d just climbed out of a pool. He couldn’t even have said what colour it was.

Under normal circumstances Xavier wouldn’t have approached her, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Thousands of people were stranded in this non-place where none had stopped before, and this unaccustomed density rendered visible things that were concealed at full speed—cracks in the concrete, a plastic bag buried in warm, gooey asphalt, a shoe smashed and crushed a hundred and fifty times a day under flowing traffic, a strip of rubber hanging like a snake’s skin from the steel rod connecting two sections of parapet set dangerously far apart. While children ran between the cars and strangers flirted through lowered windows, a group of men off in an especially tight knot of cars began to raise their voices a little, and the helicopter hovered motionless above them like a dragonfly over water, waiting for the next mosquito to leap. Xavier walked over to the woman, so he too could look at the skyscrapers. When they’d been standing in silence so long he thought he’d be better off retreating to his car just to escape the awkwardness, she spoke.

“We’ll be stuck here a while. They don’t know. They said it on the radio .”

Xavier searched for something to say. The metropolis sprawled out in suspended animation, and while it was possible to imagine a hive of activity, from Xavier’s vantage point it lay still and empty. A nauseating, organic stench rose up on the roadside, stronger even than the backdrafts from the city sewers. Xavier imagined that once this heat wave dried up the waters of the Lachine Canal, all that it normally concealed beneath its surface would be revealed, from fish carcasses half-buried in the festering silt to bikes, grocery carts, and tires. The police might turn up clues to open investigations. He edged toward the parapet and leaned over to look out below, his face scrunched up against the reek. Twenty metres below, in the deserted worksite, the dump trucks and diggers poised atop their mounds of rubble seemed tiny. The arm of an excavator was resting on the top of a wall, one of a series of staggered quadrilaterals that looked like disinterred foundations. Rusty pipes ran through the heaps of stones and concrete blocks pierced with drainage wells. The girl had also come forward to look. Xavier was still looking for something to say. She beat him to it.

“Know what they’re doing down there? It’s an archeological dig. Really old stuff, from back before the English came. And they’re paving over it all for a new highway. It’s kind of our last chance to see what’s down there. We should take a look. I’m Sarah, by the way.”

Xavier looked at her for a few seconds, startled by her boldness. It never would have crossed his mind to do anything but wait for traffic to start moving. He gazed out at the side of the highway, in search of a way down. To the north, the length they were standing on extended in a gentle curve, then descended by a few degrees under the cloverleaf. Perhaps a couple kilometres to the south, though it was hard to say for sure from this distance, the next off-ramp emerged like an outgrowth covered in stopped vehicles, before tucking back under the deck, only to fold back into the interlaced ramifications further on. A roaring helicopter hovered overhead.

“How are we going get down there? You just said we were stuck here till next week.”

She pointed into the distance, beyond the parapet.

“See that, over at the base of the pillars. Some of them have little doors.”

“Like an emergency exit?”

“Could be. I don’t know. A little closet, maybe an electrical room. I had a look, to see if there was a door up there, or some kind of access, a platform, something…. Not too far off, there’s a manhole. I could see rungs through the grid. It might all be connected. Want to check it out?”

Xavier took another look down. Orange cones were scattered around the worksite, which was bordered to the east by a row of porta-potties. Further off in the distance, heavy trucks sat parked. The site was deserted: no workers, no one scoping out the materials, no protesters demonstrating to save the heritage site. A flock of seagulls flew under the highway. He watched them until they broke formation somewhere over Little Burgundy.

“What were you going to do? Before you got stuck here?” asked Xavier.

“Meet some friends and go climbing. In Saint-Hilaire. But now it’s too late, I’m not going.”

Up to that point, Xavier had done his best not to check her out too closely. Now he noticed her muscular shoulders and prominent triceps. Another strand of hair had slipped out of her bun and was clinging to her neck, wending its way down to her black tank top.

“We don’t know each other. You have no idea who I am, or if I’m dangerous. And in the middle of the traffic jam of the century you’re asking me to follow you down into a twenty-metre cement pillar. To go see some rocks. From back before the English came.”

“You look pretty harmless.”

“What if it’s locked?”

“We’ll come back. Sit here all week till the traffic gets moving.”

“Okay. Let’s do it. I’m Xavier.”

Their clammy palms slipped so the handshake was little more than a clumsy finger grasp. Under normal circumstances, Xavier’s pride would have made him do the shake over. Clearly, these weren’t normal circumstances. They both laughed at their own awkwardness, and then kissed on the cheeks to conclude introductions. Feeling that this was a moment to embrace the unexpected, coincidence, and maybe even magic, Xavier was already on his way back to his car to close and lock the doors, and rummage through his camping gear in the trunk for his flashlight, needle-nose pliers, multi-head screwdriver, and Swiss army knife. While he was at it he finally did the thing he’d been dreaming of for hours: changed out of his soaked T-shirt and into a technical hiking top, which involved twisting his body to ease the cotton shirt loose from his sticky skin and get it over his head, with his back to Sarah, so she wouldn’t see his chest. He wasn’t in his best shape since he’d stopped working as a garbage man a few years ago, when the city privatized the service. It was demanding work, requiring stamina and the ability to stomach the stench of trash, but of all the blue collar jobs he’d held, it was his favourite. He’d never been in such good shape.

As he put his T-shirt in the trunk, he noticed the bag of emergency food he always kept, and remembered that, in with the first aid kit, candles, waterproof matches, sardines, and crackers, he would find two litres of water. He asked Sarah if she’d like a drink, then and there. The water was the temperature of warm tea; it was the most refreshing drink of their lives. Then he with his small climbing pack of tools and half-empty water bottle, and she with her rope around her shoulder, powder bag, and a couple of carabiners clipped to her harness, set off together in search of a path to the ruins.