On Highway 17

It may not have been Plymouth's prettiest '56 Savoy—pale woodland green with a russet, rusted underbody climbing past two parallel white-stripe highlights, all over dented and dinged—but its bald tires rolled sufficiently along the fresh asphalt of Highway 17 even as the battered engine wheezed, rattled and, breathing deeply in, Cob Augo didn't mind any of it because the road was winding and smooth, his guitar sat safely on the seat beside him, and, through his driver's side window rolled fully down, the rushing air felt like noise against his ears, felt like time itself rushing by, sounding like fate and smelling of unspoiled dew mixed with the thalassic aroma of the clear, calm, reflective surface of Lake Superior to the left meeting the fingertips-becoming-gnarly-mountainous-knuckles of the indestructible Canadian Shield to the right.

A logging truck rumbled by in the opposite direction.

Cob gripped the steering wheel.

Ever since Sault Ste. Marie, where he'd bid goodbye to Lake Huron and most everything else, the road had been so empty that every sign of civilisation, whether town or Town & Country, was a well-intentioned slap to the face, a reminder that he had to keep conscious because, even here, he still wasn't alone in the world. Focus: he had to keep his.

He checked the fuel gauge:

One-third left.

The truck disappeared into the rear view.

The Savoy's engine puffed, its body trembled and lurched.

Cob bounced.

The guitar strings resonated.

The engine was getting worse, its behaviour increasingly and violently erratic. Where had he first noticed it? Somewhere in New York State before the Canadian border. But it had been subtle then, just an irregular heartbeat. Now it was obvious. Now, it was getting dangerous. Maybe he'd stop and have the car checked after all. He could afford the time. He had it all worked out, and with a day to spare. Even going the long way, going the northern route, he had a day to spare.

The highway rose and ribboned around a rocky bluff.

Below, the lake was dispersing the day's sharp first light and for a moment Cob felt like he was driving straight into the brilliant water, destined to drown—or ignite—before the highway twisted away, down, and the lake was at his left again.

The road levelled off.

Cob took his palms from the steering wheel and rubbed them into his eyes.

He needed a break. He'd been driving too long.

So, that was the plan: if the next town he passed had a garage, he'd stop; he'd pay someone to listen to the engine while he drank a cup of strong coffee and maybe ate breakfast, maybe scrambled eggs and bacon.

His stomach grumbled.

He gripped the steering wheel. There wasn't a truck this time, just a realisation: 1,300 miles and the courage to take the first step were already behind him. Only 2,200 remained. One-third in the fuel tank, two-thirds left to travel, and then all would be good. He couldn't explain—or even understand—how he knew that, but he did. It was a certainty. Just get to Berkeley on time. Just do that and everything else will fall into place. This is the challenge. This is the most important journey of my life.

He glanced at the guitar.

It shone beautifully.

* * *

The town was called Black Bear Portage. The morning was windless and warm. The ruddy-skinned mechanic brought the hood of the Plymouth down with a gentle click and wiped across his forehead with a thick, oil-stained forearm. "Good car," he spat. "Bad engine."

Cob didn't say anything. He only felt indescribably thin in his thin pants and the thin stripes of his shirt, his thin laces and his thin, insignificant body.

The mechanic stubbed at a meaty chin with a fat thumb. Cob imagined the man must think him slow.

"Good car, bad engine," the mechanic repeated. "Like a good woman with an evil heart. Know what I mean, son? One that looks good while doing you wrong." Cob nodded. "But nothing that will get the best of us. No, sir. Isn't a woman or engine can't be fixed by the right man with his right hand."

"How long?" Cob asked.

The mechanic leaned his heavy body on the Plymouth, which sagged under the weight. "Two days, if parts be cooperative."

"How much?"

The mechanic started to mumble something, dropped his gaze, and Cob realised the man was honest and had an honest man's aversion to bartering.

"I need it tomorrow," Cob said. The mechanic raised his eyes. Cob raised his wallet and opened it. He removed a series of bills without counting them and placed them on the hood of the Plymouth. "But, son—." The mechanic's dry protests stuck in his throat as his dilating pupils counted the money. His lips turned pale under a set of wiry grey whiskers.

"Tomorrow," Cob repeated. "Early morning."

"Yes, sir. But, sir," the mechanic said. Cob took a step toward the passenger's side door. "A young man like yourself should save what he earns. Should save it and"—Cob swung the door open and took out his guitar, handling it tenderly, gingerly, like one handles innocence, or one's gentlest lover.—"spend it on a thing worthwhile. A thing like an education, son. That's what matters these days. An education at one of those good, big city schools. Life is not what it was when I was young. It's not just hard work. It's brains and taught trickery they want now." Cob slung the guitar over his shoulder and turned to look the mechanic in the face. "If you want to be somebody, that's what you got to have," the mechanic was saying. The money had disappeared from the hood. "Tomorrow?" Cob asked. "Early in the morning, sir," the mechanic said, before looking away.

Cob made toward the open garage doors, through which he could see the sunlit surface of Highway 17.

I am going to school, he thought. But I'm not going to pay and I'm not going to learn. I'm going because I want what I know I will become.

* * *

Feet planted outside, cheeks warmed by the sun, Cob stopped and beheld: morning had arrived but Black Bear Portage looked as dormant as it had an hour ago, when he'd first pulled in. The highway was empty—the highway that cut the town in half. Things cut in half often die. They twitch and bleed out. His mind began composing lyrics. But, before it could finish, his stomach whined so pathetically that Cob was forced to turn his attention to a more pressing matter:

Breakfast.

From across the highway, a restaurant beckoned. The Tasty Totem, its sign proclaimed; and, below, the goofy smiling face of a pipe-smoking red Indian made it clear that: "Ours may not be the best—but they are the only prices in town!"

Cob shut his eyes, didn't look both ways and crossed the street. When he was safely on the other side, when the ground felt dirt soft again, he opened them. So, fate is still on my side, he thought—as a logging truck thundered by only a few feet behind him. A reminder, he reassured himself, and felt the breeze tickle the hairs on the back of his neck.

* * *

Inside, The Tasty Totem was more restrained and less kitschy than its outside suggested.

A few patrons sat in scattered pairs, engaging in morning conversations. The bitter smell of coffee and cigarettes twirled in the air: emanating from hot cups and glass ash trays, rising, being pushed back down by an army of slowly-rotating ceiling fans. A television hung in the corner. Its black-and-white picture flickered, its sound unsynchronised and distorted. Two men sat staring at it. John F. Kennedy was on the screen. The men's mouths were open but silent. Kennedy's mouth was moving. He was reciting, "We have another sober responsibility. To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age, without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of responsibility."

"Hey," another voice said. This one was undistorted and distinctly feminine. "Hey, you."

"...I am requesting of the Congress new funds for the following immediate objectives: to identify and mark space in existing structures public and private that could be used for fall-out shelters in case of attack..."

"Yeah, you. With the guitar. In the door."

Cob's spotlights came to rest on the face of a dark-haired woman sitting alone at a table littered with jars of—

"Jams. Jellies. Spreads. Curds. Marmalades. Mushrooms."

"...food, water, first-aid kits and other minimum essentials for survival..."

She was wearing a pale pink dress. Her hair fell in long, straight bunches like sheets of black Bristol over her neck and shoulders. She was leaning forward. Cob was staring, imagining strawberry jam running down, sticking to the skin of her—

"...air-raid warning and fallout detection systems..."

"I'm only teasing," the woman said and straightened her back, puffing out her chest, perhaps thinking she'd made Cob uncomfortable by singling him out. "Come, sit, order breakfast." She smiled not insincerely; then, turning her head, exposed the perfect tendons of her neck and yelled out, "Arnold, customer! Maybe you can sell him a buttered piece of toast so as he buys one of my jams you didn't."

The tendons dissolved softly back into skin. Her face returned to Cob, who hadn't moved.

"What!" Arnold yelled from the kitchen. "And turn off that goddamn prattle box. I heard the same goddamn speech last night, and the night before, and every God damn night since the end of the God-damned war. Find me a fall-out-goddamned-shelter from that."

The men watching television closed their mouths. One got up and flicked off the president mid-word: "cont—"

The chair opposite the woman slid out from under her table. She motioned for Cob to have a seat. "I make my own preserves and other jarred eatables," she explained, the tips of her fingers absentmindedly caressing the slick surface of the plastic tablecloth.

"Customer!" she yelled at Arnold. "He's hungry. He wants breakfast. He's about to leave."

Cob unslung his guitar and leaned it against the edge of the table. The woman smelled like fruit, perspiration and sugar, he decided, lowering himself into the chair. For a moment there was silence as she studied his face and he browsed her edible wares—which she broke suddenly with a spontaneous jerk of her arm.

The glass jar crashed to the floor and shattered.

"Winnie Youngblood," the woman said as her wild blueberry spread flowed out onto the Totem's white tiles, "master preservationist of Black Bear Portage and uncoordinated."

She held out her hand and Cob shook it. Her grip was firm but caring—unorthodoxly feminine. "Cob Augo, folk songwriter of Boston, Massachusetts," he introduced himself. "And fated."

* * *

She'd already eaten. He ordered eggs, bacon and a house-special coffee that tasted like burnt caramel.

As he shovelled the food into his mouth, washing it down with flavoured caffeine whenever his throat felt textured and parched—making sure not to seem too famished, too eager—he told tales about his journey, his Plymouth, the timeline and the one day he could afford to lose, here, all while keeping silent, mental track of the precision with which her lips twitched before she smiled and the way her nails, groomed to perfect, polished curves, tapped on the metal lids of jars to emphasise favourite words and phrases, and how soft her shoulders, now hidden beneath her dress, must look when she wasn't wearing one, when she was naked, alone, relaxed.

Winnie listened and asked questions.

Cob noticed the frequency with which she blinked. He noticed, too, that as she-spoke-he-spoke, their voices and the hungry pauses between them created a kind of harmony—a music: his chewing, the rhythm; Winnie's fingernails, a beat; over which her questions and his answers became the smoothest melody.

Never had a woman made him feel this way.

He had loved, yes. But this sensation was different. Love was long-lasting and powerful. Love could cause pleasure and pain. Love enticed into sacrifice and selflessness and helped achieve fulfillment. But love was not joyous. Only music was joyous. Only creating gave joy. Here, this morning, Winnie was making him feel the way only an audience and his guitar had ever made him feel.

"I'm going north around Lake Superior and through Port Arthur," he answered, "because that's where I was born."

"When was the last time you went back?"

"I haven't."

"Why did you leave?"

"I was fifteen."

The conversation expanded in ripples: and what about Boston—where had the journey started? "Club 47." Had she heard of it? She hadn't. "And Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger?" No and no, and California was but an orange Hollywood fantasy and Massachusetts impossible to spell. "And what about you, Cob Augo?" Her eyes opened wide. "Are you real, or are you just a fantasy, too?"

His teeth broke through a strip of crispy bacon.

They both snickered.

* * *

Soon his plate was empty and the taste of coffee was fading from his lips, the restaurant's front doors swung open, swung closed, and tables saw patrons come and disappear, yet, still, they sat and talked. From his favourite pair of pants to how he'd learned to play guitar, from nylons to steel, six strings to twelve, to Christmas memories and how each had lost their virginity.

"Tell me the end of it," Winnie said abruptly.

The needle scratched the record.

The music stopped.

The sentence was too direct. Their melody tripped over its own undone shoelaces. Winnie stopped tapping on the tops of her jars. And, just like that, Cob found himself back in the only restaurant in a backward Ontario town called Black Bear Portage killing time until a dull grey-haired mechanic cured whatever disease was festering inside the engine of his ugly '56 Savoy.

The end.

"The California end of it," Winnie said. "What's in Berkeley? That's where you're going. You told me that. I want to know what happens when you get there."

"I become famous."

Winnie exploded with laughter—

Cob's jaws tightened.

—which she suppressed into an echoing, diminishing scoff. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make fun of you." She put her hand on his. Her skin was darker, his fingers longer. "I suppose I laughed because I don't understand how someone can simply become famous." She smiled. "But, remember, I only put things into jars."

"Folk is the future of music. Berkeley is the future of folk," Cob blurted out, hurt. "And I have gigs booked. I met a man in Boston at a club. He's given me dates in all the right coffee houses. Because that's what they drink in Berkeley. Coffee. They don't sell alcohol. And everyone drinks the coffee and stays up late and actually listens to the words you're singing." His excitement seethed. "All I need is to show up on time and play." He grabbed the neck of his guitar, which was still leaning against the table. "I just need to play my songs on this guitar and, if I do, nothing else matters."

"Cob Augo. Fated," she said.

"You don't believe in fate?" he shot back.

Winnie stood up from the table. "Come," she said. "You have one day to spare before you become famous. Come with me. I want to show you something."

("Arnold, make sure nobody touches my jars!")

* * *

Winnie led, Cob and his guitar followed, out of the Tasty Totem and down a narrow gravel lane that cut away, perpendicular, to Highway 17 and away from Black Bear Portage.

The lane led into the forest. Its gravel soon became dirt, needles and decomposing leaves. Tire marks remained faintly visible in sporadic patches of dried mud. "Where are we going?" Cob asked. "Home," Winnie said. "Do you have a car?" Cob asked. "I don't drive," Winnie said.

He struggled to keep pace with her long strides. He struggled to keep his eyes off her long legs. She wore bulky brown homemade boots that didn't go at all with her pink dress, the loose ends of which bounced hypnotically off the insides of her knees as she walked. Lower, her calves flexed; her calves slackened. The dress had a simple cut that hid most of her figure, but at least from the knees to the ankles she was bare. Though Cob's eyes didn't discriminate. They made out the shape of her ass through the dress. They studied the folds in the cotton material as it gathered around her hips. And they marvelled when, in the intermittent streams of late morning sunlight flashing through the foliage, the black hair sliding across her back teased black and flirted with blue.

Winnie turned off the lane without stopping. "Shortcut," she announced. Cob stared into the forest, which threatened with shadows and hidden moisture, and tried to wonder why he kept following—why not refuse, why not turn back? But the truth was impossible to avoid. The way he'd felt in the restaurant, how Winnie had made him feel: he wanted to feel that way again: to feel joy with her again. If only one more time.

"Are there bears out here?" he asked.

"Of course," she said. "Black ones, and wolves." And took several steps forward, which Cob dutifully aped. Winnie looked as comfortable covered by shade, in the land of the wild creatures, as she had in the light, in the land of people. Cob felt unsure, cooler. The guitar weighed more heavily on his body here. "It's not much further. Just to the river, then across, then up the mountain." She waited for a reaction. When none came, "It's not actually a mountain," she admitted. "It's really more of a hill."

* * *

Cob heard the water before he saw it: a faint buzzing that intensified like a swarm of insects, steady without the monotony of mechanisms, always on the verge of crashing, of waves, like the string of a guitar plucked hard, once-and-forever.

The trees ended.

He emerged from amongst them and approached Winnie, who was already standing on the slick, rocky edge of the white rushing water of the ("They call it the Dead Horse.") river.

Lovely, he thought. "Because the horse could go no further," Winnie said in the direction of the opposite shore. The sun was transforming the sky into afternoon. Morning felt foreign, distant. "The rider was being pursued. When he realized that the horse was dying of thirst, heard the howling of the hunt, he dismounted, fell to his knees and prayed to the gods to save them both—to allow his escape." She stepped into the water. It rose to the tops of her boots. Cob remained where he stood. "On hearing his prayers, the gods granted his wish. And the rider became the river." Another step forward: the surface surrounded her calves. "The horse drank and was refreshed. The pursuers passed. The horse lived a long and unhappy riderless life until, one day, passing the river once more, it fell in and drowned."

Winnie's boot slid—but she threw out her arms in time to keep her balance.

Downriver, something smashed into a jutting rock.

"Winnie!" Cob called out.

Her body looked magical walking on the water. "What are you doing?" he asked. But she couldn't hear him. She was already halfway across and the torrent's growl was too loud. Yet, for all the noise, its foamy claws still reached no higher than her calves.

Three, four, a dozen more steps, the last few conquered at a skip, and she was safely on the other side.

She spun, the wind whipped, snapped at her hair, she was laughing, her dark boots dripped water, "Come on!" she yelled.

"That horse story doesn't make any sense," he yelled back.

"I made it up."

The wind pushed her pink dress against her brown body and, for the first time, he saw the outline of her stomach, her breasts, the triangular space between her thighs. He wanted to cross the river as badly as he'd wanted anything—almost: he wanted it almost as much as he wanted Berkeley.

"Take off your shoes if you're too civilised," she said. "And don't worry. There's a path. Just stay on the rocks."

"I don't swim!"

Her shore was fifty paces from his but every one seemed undefeatable.

She sat and took off her boots. "Don't swim. Walk."