People Live Still in Cashtown Corners Read online

  People Still Live in

  Cashtown Corners

  Tony Burgess

  ChiZine Publications

  FIRST EDITION

  People Live Still in Cashtown Corners

  © 2010 by Tony Burgess

  Cover artwork © 2010 Erik Mohr

  Cover design © 2010 Corey Lewis

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cashtown Corners does exist; the people and events as portrayed here, however, are fictitious.

  Except for Charlie.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  People live still in Cashtown Corners / Tony Burgess.

  ISBN 978-1-926851-05-1

  I. Title.

  PS8553.U63614P46 2010 C813'.54 C2010-903995-5=20

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited by Brett Alexander Savory

  Copyedited and proofread by Sandra Kasturi

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For Rachel Jones, my true love

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Photos

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BACK COVER

  1

  There is a point at which you find yourself, where, and this is not just what I think but this is the way we are designed to think and it’s this: if the entire universe, and I mean every corner of every atomized corner of infinity; if everything that is isn’t aware of or doesn’t understand my most inconsequential, half-formed thoughts, then there is no chance that the highest-formed acts by the noblest mind are greater than gross self-love.

  When I scrape tar from the side of my sneakers onto the edge of the island, it passes through the world as both the idea that preceded me doing it but also as a shadow formed by my shoe leaning edgewise, and it forms a commanding ripple outward through all things. It must be exactly this way or the little hand that saves the little face from drowning in a great flood somewhere else is the same as shitting. I exist in an infinite number of times.

  I stand beside the island, all of my transforming eyes moving independently, sure; but primarily I swing my arms in a natural way as I approach a car pulled over at Cashtown Corners. It is a silver 2005 Corolla with a single occupant. She is leaning over to examine her purse and positioning her head so that she can see through the side mirror. I am aware of when she can see me and this is one of the primary recordings. We are both aware of the recordings being made as I stop at her window. She will pause for a broken second to appear natural—it is a theatrical device; if you are interrupted it gives the illusion you aren’t pretending. Her hand stops between her purse and the stick and she looks ahead before looking up.

  “Fill, please. Regular.”

  I don’t smile and turn toward the back of the car. This is just going to be what I call a nothing. That is, I am not going to do anything with this. The gas door pops open as she releases it from within and I pull it back and twist off the cap. There will be a dark belly inside the car waiting for this moment but I will act as if all I care about is what I do next. The nozzle is taken from the pump. The grade is selected and the nozzle is inserted into the fitted hole. The hose jerks up a little when the gas enters. So, as you can see, I am fully capable of acting as if everything is going to matter. I don’t know how much gas she will need and I am willing to accept that this is still going to be all right. I step away from the pump. She looks at this and I move to her window. Am I caught up in something now? Are things— very distant things, mind you—lifting their heads above the grass to ‘get involved’? I can’t say. It’s not exactly that kind of thing.

  “Clean your windshield?”

  One expects that I am aware how old fashioned it is to ask this, to do this kind of courtesy. I am not aware of this, even as I point it out. I am aware, however, that she has smiled and has nodded pleasantly. I draw the squeegee, even as I resent the word, out of the bucket. Water is carried in the form of a comet tail up to her windshield.

  She looks uncomfortable as I work the sponge side in small wobbles across the white ‘R’ of a flattened insect. She doesn’t want to look up at it. I am aware that to her it’s as if I had removed my penis from my pants and pushed its tip onto the surface of her eye. Its eye and her eye touching. She looks down at her knees. I have taken the insect away but left a chalk outline. The same as cliché activists leave behind. I do see the ‘T’ of the squeegee as a shade and I decide that, except for this woman breaking piss tears on her cheek, things are very ‘this happens all the time now.’ I do put the ‘T’ shadow and the ‘R’ insect aside in case today is a special word as well.

  She cranes back to see the pump through the rear passenger window. She pretends to read it and looks to me for the number she has just pretended to read.

  “Thirty-two.”

  She acts pleased and gives me two twenties. As her Corolla leaves the lot the rear drops and bounces up. I always watch for this. I’m not sure why. The car turns and sits at the red light. This is one of my favourite things. Cashtown Corners is an intersection at the bottom of a small but deep basin. You drop to get here and you climb to leave. It’s a very descriptive place to be. And most of the time there is no one here but me. I have sat and watched lights turn red, then green, then orange, then red, then green, then orange, then red, then green, then orange and on and on without a single car or truck or person to see it. She sits at the red light, as dumb as the air around her, and waits. I watch and I am the air around her now. The light turns green. It doesn’t just turn green. A chuck of darkness drops in the way of the red and the green rises. These are the moments I watch. I want to see their character. The car will not move instantly. It will sit for a moment and then move. In that second I look for what the car says. Each car that accepts a colour and acts does so in the form of talking. These are some that I have heard: “Oh, I was going to go now anyway so thanks for reminding me,” and “Thank heavens it’s time to go,” and “I’m not sure—I should look, but you know,” and “I have only ever glanced at you to see if we agree on things.” The woman in the silver Corolla sits for a while at the green. I always enjoy this kind. She sits in front of the green light and doesn’t move. No car but hers for as far as the eye can see.

  I step from my booth and walk toward her. It’s so weird because I don’t really have an expectation, but because she has not moved on a green and we sit at the bottom of an empty dirt and gravel satellite dish in the country, we can experiment with the basic assumptions. As I approach her car I see what she is doing. She is applying makeup or something. Some light thing at the front of her face. She sees me coming and stops.

  I stop. Here we are like two long shadows, minute hands and hour hands cutting into a black and white city. I lift my arm and point to the green light. She is going to play this a little different than you or I might. Roll down the window. Don’t roll down the window. Put the mascara away to talk to the m
an or just wave with it. Smile face or cry face? She has opted for cry face and wave at the man. I turn my point into an upturned hand and the light goes green to orange.

  The light goes green to orange.

  The light. Goes. Green. To. Orange.

  I am not a sentimental man. I’m not a particularly empathetic man. But the light has gone from green to orange and she waits. But the light had been green and now it has gone. That particular interval of green that had been waiting in a throat like the only word ever spoken. The only word that had a hope of pushing aside the tongue. Of treating the meat of the mouth to a brief second of real dancing. And she sat while the mouth crashed like a stricken child and while the ear of these corners, the ears themselves, sharp and perfectly cut to match and vanish—she sat and made her little cry face at me while the ears disappeared.

  She doesn’t expect me to open her door, and let me set this up properly for you. A lone car sits at a perfectly good intersection in the bottom of a basin. A man has left his booth on the lot where she has just bought gas. The man approaches her car and points. She looks annoyed and a little surprised. He then walks up to her vehicle and opens the door. He says something to her and she tries to close the door but he has pulled it open even farther. She pushes down on the gas to escape but he has a very tight hold of her arm. The car moves into the middle of the intersection but she slides to the ground still held by the hook of the man’s hand.

  The car rolls to an edge of the intersection, then up into a pile of stones.

  The woman tries to escape. She’s kicking the ground and swinging at the man with her free hand but he has a very tight hold of her arm. The man gets the woman onto her back and he steps on her neck. You can see him bouncing all his weight on the one foot. She soon stops moving and he quickly drags her back up onto the lot and past his little booth. Just before they enter the trailer at the back of the lot she moves again. Her hands make grabby gestures at the ground, but he manages with a series of kicks to get her safely into the trailer.

  I have seen the whole world appear green. I have seen the whole world appear red.

  One of the things I like to do while I sit in my booth is pretend it’s September 11. How awesome is that? Anyone can do it and it’s like you have the greatest time for free. Your imagination can do whatever it wants to, of course, and that’s how we get things like sex with alligators and people who make baby bridges across rivers of lava. But every once in a while the imagination gets to step over its borders and be something. That happened on September 11. An airplane going several hundred miles an hour, full of people, pierced the side of a building. I like to think about looking out the window of the plane. Oh. Look. There’s New York City rising up around me. Buildings so close it looks like the wings are touching them. There’s a gentleness to the wings. They are flexible and stretch up slightly as we descend. They are compensating a little, controlling the air flow, making certain that the pressure above the wings is lighter than that below. And the buildings seem to lean slightly away to make room. This flight plan, this design, this cityscape is commercial. Business is done this way. People have to feel secure in order to buy things, to invest their money. We have bought these tickets to ride in order to get places. You see how you think? You are drawing together all the comfort that design has implied and you are stretching your legs and waiting for the chance to stand and walk away.

  Then the nose of the plane touches the side of the building. It doesn’t wait there but if we’d like, it can. The plane’s nose touches the building like a baby whale floats to its mother’s side and pushes its nose against to her as if to say, “I’m here, mom.” The plane is perpendicular to the building. The building is immovable and sunk into the only footprint it will ever make. It is so tall, though, that it takes on some of the air’s properties. The illusion that it moves, that it soars, that it rises. The plane, which now waits quietly, still touching the building, has in fact some of the air’s properties and this isn’t an illusion.

  You sit forward in your chair a little, trying to relieve a knot at the base of your back. The edge of the building the plane has touched is visible through your window and you see the sun reflected like a giant diamond. Big things are only beautiful because they are big. They may in fact be ugly and small and poorly imagined. The nose of the plane turns up and crinkles as if that was all it intended to do. An instinctive expression. A bothered face that says something. But the eyes and the mouth and forehead enter an office space where several people sit and stand amid desks and cubicles. They ignore the plane that is now a number of feet in. It tightens its jaw and pulls the floor down. I can see someone at a photocopier, which means I am inside now. I am standing inside a plane inside a building. There are food and clothes in the air. There are shoulders compensating. There are wheels on sticks meeting at angles. You have ways of knowing this is happening, but it’s frustrating. It’s like an infection you have. You know you have it. The skin burns a little and you have more emotion than you know what to do with, but when you ask the doctor, “Is it spreading?” and he says, “This will stop it,” he hasn’t really answered your questions. You want to know what the infection is doing. It advances in tissue. It colours and corrupts cells. It multiplies, giving birth over and over again inside you, splashing into your eyes and lungs. So you wanted to know: How many advance? How much dies? Doctor’s guess. They sit at the bottom of a dish and study the lights. When you slip down the side they will tell you to wait for the green, but what they don’t tell you is that they know absolutely nothing and that the lights change whether he says so or not or whether you are there or not.

  The plane goes in and it’s just September 11. Soon another one will come and it’s still September 11.

  2

  I have to go to town this morning. I’ll tell you later about what happened with me and that lady. Right now I gotta go into town to get some stuff. I have a boy who does a short shift from four in the afternoon until eight. He’s a really nice kid. Jeremy. He lives with his parents in Creemore. I don’t think it’s easy for kids these days. Especially in small towns. There are all kinds of pressures on you to do bad things and good things. And, let’s face it, you’re going to have to do a little of both before you level off. Anyhow, Jeremy seems a good kid. Respectful and friendly, but he listens to music and likes his skateboard.

  “Hi.”

  He calls me Mr. Clark sometimes, but not this afternoon.

  “Hey, Jeremy.”

  He sets his skateboard behind the windshield washer fluid.

  “Pump three is really slow for some reason so I’m trying to avoid it. If the fuel truck comes this afternoon you can mention it to him and he might ask about it for me.”

  He nods, but I know he won’t mention it. It’s okay. I pull my till out and slide it into the safe and pull out his. He checks his pen and the things he likes around, like his watch which he lays out beside the till and a little MP3 player he plugs into my boombox. He doesn’t start this all up until I go. Kids like to live in their own world but the good ones wait until you’re gone first.

  We don’t talk much and for a moment I stand thinking about this. Should we? Is something missing from this? I have said I like him and given some good reasons. I saw how he liked his possessions and I fixed him up with his own till. He is aware that I’m just standing here.

  “Anything else, Mr. Clark?” See? I told you he calls me Mr. Clark. I can’t answer him right away because obviously I’m thinking about how I had said this and I’m just holding on until I stop thinking about it.

  “Is it okay if I listen to music?” See? I told you that he likes music. Unfortunately the things he’s saying and doing are such strong reminders of what I have been saying that it’s a bit like I’m in two places at once. He’s looking at me but he can’t figure it out, either. I am going to have to do something that I have not been thinking about. I turn and leave.

  I manage to get out the door but stop beside pump one. I guess it
feels like I should just go back in there and say something only to him. I can sense him looking. I raise my hand and say, “Going to town.” He waves back but can’t hear me. It feels a little sad that we are talking like this. Time to go.

  East of Cashtown Corners is Creemore. West is nothing really, unless you push through to New Lowell. South is Avening. North is Stayner. The truck I get into is a 1972 Chevrolet pickup. I won it three years ago at the Stayner Lion’s Club 37th Annual Summer Dance and Truck draw. The damn thing is cherry red. I never take it to Stayner for obvious reasons. I opt instead for Creemore.

  “How can I help you today, Mr. Clark?”

  That’s Jeffrey Peck or Feck or something. The pharmacist. Tough little guy. Looks like a champion thumb wrestler. Mean and thick and strong. I don’t like faces on people in town so I scribble over them. I don’t actually recall what Feck looks like in the face. Just swirls and loops out of a ball point. Round and round and round. When he talks, two or three blue wires vibrate horribly. Doesn’t make me want to answer.

  “Gotta headache, Mr. Clark?” He’s talking to me like I’m a kid so I head for the door. Penny Larkin is on the cash. She tries to smile at me but the tangle of blue lines that make up her head only manage to sort of point around the room in a random way.

  “Need some gum.”

  Penny’s head stops for moment.

  “Well, there’s lots of gum. They come out with a new kind of gum every day.”

  This isn’t precisely what I had in mind when I came to town. I didn’t want gum. I’m merely trying to get outside now. But before I leave I’m going to get this right. If I am just about anything I want to be and I can be that thing just about anywhere I want, how is it that I can get trapped like this? At the back of the store I’m supposed to know about a headache. Up here, standing within a foot or two of the door, I need to be thinking about what it means to make new gum everyday. This question about gum is the one that has problems. A new gum every day. I can feel that that might be horrible. It almost sounds as if we are giving up other things to allow this. I am staring at a pyramid of jaw harp boxes. Aware that there is no obvious or clear path through this. I can’t tell how badly Penny needs me right now. The gum doesn’t matter to us. I touch the top jaw harp box. Pale yellow with Halloween-orange writing. I should not have put the scribbles on her face.