Runner Up: City Boy

The urge to piss had made its way to the very edge of Ryan’s body. He hastily ordered the fish burrito and ran outside. The washroom was around the back of the building and he held his breath as he opened the door, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The mop bucket in the corner was filled with black water; the teal lino was cracked and split, revealing several strata of linoleum underneath, but the smell was bearable thanks to a mountain scent Glade plug-in. It was a single room, at least—one door, sink, toilet, all to himself—bringing a brief moment of relief before he attempted to lock the door. There were markings on the doorframe that suggested that there had once been a deadbolt. Ryan considered running across the street to the gas station, but instead attempted to hold the heavy grey door shut with one hand while hovering above the toilet. No matter his positioning, either the door or the toilet was out of reach. The familiar hum of anxiety grew and he ran the tap full force, hoping the sound would signal the restroom’s occupancy. He bounced from foot to foot now as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sawed-off plastic medicine spoon—the kind used to feed penicillin to small children. He didn’t bother lifting the seat; with his back to the door and his jeans unbuttoned, he dipped the spoon’s wide mouth into the elastic of his underwear and pressed it firmly against his genitals. Nothing happened for a second, until he consciously relaxed his stomach muscles and hot piss filled the mouth of the spoon, ran down the handle and out the sawed-off tip into the bowl. The stream was silent, drowned out by the hiss of the facet. In the cracked mirror above the sink, he watched himself and realized how exhausted he looked. By the time he felt the warmth on his thighs and then his calves, it was too late—he had pissed himself.

He abandoned his burrito, now sitting deserted on the table next to his half-empty glass of ice water, and walked back to his hostel room through the alleyway behind the restaurant.

 

Ryan only had the one pair of jeans with him, three white t-shirts, a red and black checkered shirt, sixteen pairs of underwear, twelve pairs of socks, a jar of Vegemite, a notebook with all but five pages blank, a well-worn sleeping bag and an old Jays cap—all of which was shoved into a duffle bag that he had embarrassingly sewn a Canadian flag on five years earlier. The flight back from Australia had been long and cramped, much more so than the flight out. He remembered his face on that first flight, reflected in the little round window, “Hallelujah" in his headphones—he had just discovered Leonard Cohen; he had just discovered the size of the world and the lights of Sydney Harbor below twinkled with potential. The connecting flights back to Canada, however, seemed to suck whole years of his life away and Ryan threw up at least twice on each leg of the four-leg journey. Not being able to afford a flight that would take him home to Toronto, he settled for a drastically cheaper flight to Vancouver, where he washed dishes in a breakfast joint for two weeks and never once saw the mountains because of the fog. He complained about this on the fourteenth day, his fingertips wincing from the dishwater and his forehead sweaty from the steam. A tall waiter with a Phish tattoo and a septum piercing told him it was actually low-lying clouds as he dropped two more plates coated in ketchup and egg scraps into the dish bin. Ryan was starting to hate Vancouver.

 

Ryan rinsed out his jeans in the bathroom and put on a pair of mauve track pants he had pulled out of the lost and found bin at the hostel. The computers in the hallway took five minutes to pull up Netscape so Ryan browsed the mostly empty brochure rack of things to do in and around Princeton, BC. When his inbox loaded, he had a message from [email protected]:

Sorry. I have had a change of plans and I have to leave tomorrow morning instead. If you still want the ride let me know. I’ll pick you up outside the bus depot at 9am. Kelly

Ryan had taken the Greyhound eight hours from Vancouver to Princeton in order to catch this ride back to Toronto.

No problem. That works even better. See you there. Cheers, Ryan

 

Ryan was his last name, but his first name, which had been Charlotte, hadn’t suited him for quite some time. Even before the regular injections of Delatestryl had dropped his voice and bulked out his upper body, Charlotte had been discarded by his friends in favor of Ryan. Ryan was twenty-five, but looked younger and had a hard time buying beer in Australia because people assumed his Ontario license was a fake. His acne, a side effect of the Delatestryl, had cleared up in the last year and left him with pale skin the texture of an orange, which he didn’t mind on account of the fact that he thought it made him look rugged. He had shaved his head hoping to up the ante on the rough and tumble, but in truth he still looked like a green kid from the city, which was mostly what he was. The injections had bumped him up a shirt size, but he was still wiry and there was something gentle about his face and eyes, which were bright in a way that he didn’t think suited him anymore.

Fall air is cold, but it doesn’t pierce the skin, he thought; it just holds you gently in its dry mouth as everything around is slipping into winter.

When Ryan got back to his room someone else had checked in and was undressing by the bunk opposite his. The man was dressed top to bottom in denim and was pulling off dirty boots the same colour as his blond hair, which seemed to have grown in shaggy from what was likely a close buzz. Ryan, who had been enjoying having the room to himself, glanced at his wet jeans on the radiator before climbing into his bunk and rolling to the wall to give his new roommate some privacy. After a few moments filled with the sounds of snaps and zippers, he heard the mattress creak and the light went out. The exit sign above the door threw a red blanket over the room.

Ryan rolled onto his back and looked up at the engravings on the top bunk, most of which declared that someone “wuz here” at a particular moment; others attested to various cock sizes and one in the corner said “Max + Kelly” inside an uneven, hastily etched heart. Ryan’s thoughts turned to [email protected]. He hoped she would be a tall butch girl with small tits and strong arms and began to imagine them fucking on the hood of her pick-up truck somewhere just off the Trans-Canada highway. His fantasy was interrupted by what sounded like a fluttering that had briefly coincided with Ryan’s quickening heartbeat. It was in fact his roommate tugging at an impressive rate. Ryan rolled over onto his stomach, tucked his head under his pillow and waited for sleep.

 

The next morning his room was empty. Ryan put his jeans on still slightly wet from the night before and walked the three blocks to the bus depot. On his way he stopped by Kootenay Convenience to buy a bag of trail mix and a pack of Belmont Mild smokes, the short stubby kind that he liked because they burned down before he had a chance to get nauseous.

Ryan wasn’t really a smoker, but liked to have something to do with his hands when he was nervous. The air was cool and for the first time he noticed that it was fall and felt at home. It was his favorite season and he had missed it in Australia, where the only seasons were wet and dry. Fall air is cold, but it doesn’t pierce the skin, he thought; it just holds you gently in its dry mouth as everything around is slipping into winter. “Smell that,” he said to no one at all. “Dead leaves and love.”

The tension between his heart and the invisible lemon—he supposed that anxiety was the right word for it, but sadness felt the same way, and at times it was hard to tell the two feelings apart.

He had met Isobel in the fall five years ago. Thinking about it made him sick, made it feel like there was string wrapped around his heart and at the bottom of the string a weight, not heavy, just about the size of a lemon, pulling down, pulling the string tighter as his muscles and rib cage braced to keep his heart in place. The tension between his heart and the invisible lemon—he supposed that anxiety was the right word for it, but sadness felt the same way, and at times it was hard to tell the two feelings apart. Either way, what good was it doing to think about her? So he stopped.

A dusty old red Chevy truck, a cliché of a truck, pulled into the parking lot. Ryan smiled, remembering the fantasy he had had the night before, but behind the steering wheel was not the butch woman of last night’s invention, but a man, late twenties, furrowed brow, stubble and sandy blond hair. The truck stopped in front of Ryan. Its front plate had an airbrushed Jesus fish on it. The driver got out quickly and looked over the open door at Ryan. He was dressed top to bottom in denim—it was Ryan’s roommate from the hostel. Ryan wondered why the denim clad stranger was looking at him.

“Well I’ll be…I guess there aren’t many places to stay round here,” said the stranger.

Ryan was confused and didn’t say anything.

“You Ryan?”

“Yeah,” he said, realizing that a mistake had been made. This man was his ride; this man was the Kelly he was waiting for. He didn’t move, hoping he was wrong. He thought of the hundreds of miles of road stretched out between this parking lot and Toronto.

“Kelly,” the stranger said coming out from behind the driver-side door and holding out his hand. “You were probably expecting a girl, eh?”

Their hands met in a firm shake and Ryan noticed the size of Kelly’s forearms, his rolled-up sleeves brimming with muscle.

“Nice to meet you.” Not knowing what else to do, Ryan threw his duffle in the flatbed of the truck and got in. The cab smelled like banana peels and cigarettes.

“So where are you from?” asked Kelly as he pulled himself back into the trunk and closed the door behind him—heavy and final.

“Toronto,” clearing his throat as he said it.

“Ahh…a city boy then? I’ll try not to hold that against ya.”

Ryan nodded and blew air out of his nostrils, acknowledging the friendly jab.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Kelly replied, pulling open an ashtray filled with stale cigarette butts. Ryan lit a smoke and Kelly Rose pulled the truck out of the parking lot and drove east.

 

The first hour was filled with basic itinerary details.

“What brought you out West?”

“On my way back from Australia.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“I went for a girl.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah it was,” Ryan said.

“Did she dump you?”

“It didn’t work out.”

And so on.

From this back and forth in which they both spoke as little as possible, Ryan told Kelly that he had run off to Australia for an older woman – older meant barely twenty-four at the time – and that he had surfed twice while there and travelled through Kakadu National Park, which is nearly half the size of Switzerland and was by far the most beautiful place he had ever been.

Kelly told Ryan exactly nothing about himself. He seemed pensive, but when he did speak he was quite abrasive. Other than Kelly offering Ryan a sandwich from the cooler behind his seat, they were mostly silent for the second hour.

“I didn’t see the mountains once in Vancouver,” Ryan said, speaking for the first time without being addressed.

“Damn fog, I don’t like Vancouver much myself. Too many fucking hippies.”

Ryan laughed. Kelly was right. They were everywhere, smarmy white boys with hemp pants and giant lattes.

“They got hippies in Australia?”

Ryan thought about it, “Not really. I mean they do, but they’re different.”

“How?”

“It’s more like everyone is laidback there, then there are the surfers who are really laidback. Then there are the activists. I guess they’re sort of hippies.”

“See, I get not working because you love to surf and you just want to do that all the time. If you can make that work for you, I say go for it,” Kelly shrugged. “But to be a lazy fucking hippy who sits back bitching and moaning about a system you refuse to participate in, gets right up my ass.”

It was something else entirely that bothered Ryan about hippies, particularly male hippies—lack of examination of privilege, their style and its bouquet of appropriations, devil sticks and drum circles – but he didn’t think of them as lazy, nor did he object to their attempt, however misguided, to buck the system.

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” He decided it was best to avoid political debate at this point.

Ryan had been leaning on his bunched up sweat shirt and staring at himself in the passenger side mirror for quite some time as the mountains went by behind him. He realized he was starting to drool and sat up. He glanced at Kelly, who didn’t take his eyes off the road; they hadn’t spoken for hours. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the sky was a peach-coloured blanket ornamented with the occasional white tuft.

“Where you from?” asked Ryan, sucking the silence out of the cab. Kelly glanced over, looking a bit surprised.

“Outside of Edmonton.”

“Never been there,” said Ryan, “what do you do?”

Kelly glanced at him and then back at the bend in the road.

“I’m a student,” he replied flatly.

“What do you study?”

“I’m doing a doctorate in quantum mechanics. You thought I was a dumb hick didn’t you?”

“No.” Ryan’s voice cracked just a little as he said it.

“Bullshit!”

“Okay, okay, but there is a distance between dumb hick and PhD of quantum physics—”

“Mechanics,” corrected Kelly.

“—sorry, mechanics. And I had you pegged in between the two somewhere.”

Kelly laughed and it was clear no harm was done, but the rest of the night passed in silence and Ryan drifted off to sleep sometime after midnight. When he woke up the highway had gone skinny and branches were swiping the side of the truck. They pulled into a campsite and before getting out Kelly said, “If you’ve got any food in your pack, might want to lock it in the cab. Bears.”

Kelly left the headlights on so they could set up camp.

“Thanks for lending me a tent,” Ryan said, picking up the orange bag Kelly had thrown at his feet.

“No worries man, it might smell like a dog’s ass, but it’s all yours.”

They pitched in silence and climbed inside their tents without as much as a goodnight. The tent did smell awful, like rotting canvas, which reminded Ryan of his days as a Girl Guide, which in turn reminded him of his leader Melanie—who had been the subject of many of his adolescent fantasies. Tired and cold, Ryan pulled his knees up to his chest inside his sleeping bag and shut his eyes.

 

He woke to the whistle of a kettle and stepped outside to see Kelly sitting by a healthy campfire. Ryan sat on a rock opposite Kelly, who nodded and handed him a cup of instant in a blue specked enamel mug. They drank their coffee in silence as the sky exchanged less light for more and then they packed their tents and tore off down the road.

The goal was to make Winnipeg before quitting for the night. When the sun had gone down the night before they were still in the mountains, but now there was only flat in front of the bumper and the horizon seemed to bend on either side of the point the road made in the distance.

“The road looks like time when it’s this straight and long,” Ryan said out loud without thinking.

“What?” Kelly raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing, I think I’m still half-asleep.” Ryan pulled down the visor to block the rising sun hovering over the road’s end. There was a bent and greasy photograph attached to the visor with a rubber band. Finger prints on the face and the back-lighting made it hard to see much except that it was a woman.

“There’s a spare pair of sunglasses in the glove box,” offered Kelly. Ryan took them out and put them on; they were too big for his face.

That first day they had only eaten in the car, bagels and muffins from Tim Horton’s and a Big Mac in Calgary—so Ryan was surprised when they pulled into the parking lot of The Prairie Dog Diner and Kelly said they were stopping. Kelly ordered the lumberjack breakfast with bacon, sausage and ham on the side of his three eggs and Ryan ordered a western. The menus were written on pieces of cardboard and surprising care had been put into the lettering and layout. You could see pencil under the marker lines, which were drawn with a ruler, making the letters and numbers look strangely stiff.

“I’m a cattle farmer,” said Kelly.

“What?” Confused, Ryan put down his sandwich and waited for Kelly to respond.

“I was just pulling your leg about the PhD. I’m a cattle farmer. Whole family is cattle farmers.”

Ryan started laughing and Kelly followed.

“You had me going.”

“Yeah, I know I did. ‘Quantum mechanics’,” he said, shaking his head.

When they were done eating Kelly paid for his six dollar meal with a ten and told Doris the waitress to keep the change, holding her eyes for long enough to make her visibly uncomfortable, before stepping outside and pissing in a planter around the side of the diner. Ryan hadn’t been drinking much water and thanks to Kelly’s tendency to piss outdoors at every opportunity, he thankfully had never had to use a stall in Kelly’s presence.

 

That day driving through the prairies with the grass twitching in the wind on either side of the road like itchy gold, they spoke more and their voices rose out of the low rumbling of the day before. Ryan asked about farming and Kelly explained how to cook a perfect steak.

“Tell you what, if we ever do this again, I’ll bring us a couple of beauties and we can grill ’em on the camp fire. Nothing like it.”

Kelly asked about the Australian heartbreaker and Ryan gave him the highlights. Told him about how he met Isobel in a little arcade on Yonge Street at his niece’s birthday party. Isobel had been playing pinball and swearing at the machine in a thick Australian accent. He told Kelly about the night that she had asked him to come back home to Sydney with her—how it happened in Niagara Falls the weekend before she was going to leave Canada, just three months after they met.

“We were in a heart-shaped jacuzzi looking down on the falls—”

“Shit, that must have cost an arm and a leg!”

“Nah, whole thing was a hundred dollars with a steak dinner included at The Keg.”

“Fuck The Keg.”

“We were looking down at the falls and she says that she can’t believe that we’ve only known each other three months. She says that she can’t believe that it just ends here. I joke and say, ‘You know what they say? All good things come to an end,’ and then paused just a second before saying, ‘in a heart-shaped jacuzzi.’ She laughed hard. She always laughed so hard at my dumbest jokes.”

Kelly nodded his head, smiling.

“It was the next part though that killed me. She stopped laughing and said, ‘You’ve just made my time here so damn wonderful.’ It killed me. Until that moment I don’t think going all the way over there was an option for me. I mean shit, I was only nineteen. But nothing ever made me feel as good as hearing her say that. So when she said, ‘Come with me,’ later that evening, I just said yes.”

“So what happened then? What are you doing back here?”

“Nothing happened. It just ended.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was just over,” Ryan was feeling choked up. He hadn’t talked about Isobel at all since he’d left Australia. He hadn’t really talked to anyone about anything and wanted to change the subject. “Who’s the girl in the photo?” he asked.

“That’s my girl Alice,” said Kelly. “No fancy story there, we started going out in high school—ten years later, still screwing.”

“You married?”

“Hell no. She asks, but no way. Might not have a PhD, but I’m smarter than that.”

He was ashamed of this camouflage, but it was instinct, and well-earned after receiving more than his share of poundings.

Things got quiet again for a minute and Ryan was relieved for the silence. This time though, there was an awkwardness that wasn’t there yesterday. The day before they had just been detached, now it was like neither of them knew what to say. Kelly spoke up after a few minutes.

“Tell you what, my old lady… I don’t love her worth a damn, but she still fucks like a buck in springtime after all these years. Best part is she can’t have babies, so no need for a raincoat.”

Ryan said nothing and sat there in the silence, noticing how much they both stunk of campfire. Normally, despite his conscience, he would play along with this type of banter in these situations—laugh and nod at lowbrow remarks that ground him the wrong way in the interest of blending in. It was about survival. He was scared of raising suspicion, didn’t want anyone to smell the difference on him, a difference that usually marked him as a fag. He was ashamed of this camouflage, but it was instinct, and well-earned after receiving more than his share of poundings. This time however, on the highway, in the middle of nowhere, he said nothing and visibly disapproved of Kelly’s misogyny and cruelty. For some reason, he felt disappointed in Kelly, and wished he hadn’t exposed his wounded heart in the cab of that truck. He lit a cigarette and Kelly did the same.

 

Hours later on the same straight road, the silence had gotten heavier and was pressing in on their respective shoulders.

“The next place we see, can you stop? I need to take a piss.” Piss—he felt the word come out of his mouth and wanted to suck it back in, tackle it with his tongue, swallow it, and say instead that he needed a pit stop, needed to take a shit, anything. Kelly pulled the truck over on the shoulder; there was a gutter between it and the endless wheat, which was perfectly still now—not a breath of wind.

Ryan pulled the sticky handle and sunk his sneakers into the gravel of the shoulder. As he rose the stone is his throat sunk into his gut and pushed on his full bladder. A thick tangle of barbed wire separated the ditch from the wheat and there wasn’t so much as a shadow for cover. Ryan walked over to the edge of the ditch, cautious not to draw attention to himself by taking too much time. He jumped into the ditch and pulled the medicine spoon out of his front pocket as he jumped. His hand was shaking. He didn’t look back at the truck; he hoped his angle was what it needed to be; he hoped Kelly would stay in the truck, that he was playing with the radio or staring off into the opposite field. He dipped the spoon in—nothing. His body felt solid, like nothing inside it moved. Not his blood. Not his heart, which just felt big, still and heavy. He noticed he wasn’t breathing and exhaled. Piss trickled out, slow and steady, and arched out of the sawed-off tip of the spoon as gold as the field. His legs stayed cool and dry. He stuck the spoon back in his pocket without drying it and he did up his fly. He climbed out of the ditch and got back into the truck —relieved and sweating from every pore. Kelly was digging behind the passenger seat for something and pulled out a cassette tape.

“You mind if I put on some music?”

“No.”

Kelly popped the cassette in the deck and it made a long whine before spitting out the first notes of “Welcome to the Jungle”.

In the gap between that song and the next, Kelly said, “I don’t know why I said that shit.”

The less notorious second track of Appetite for Destruction started and Kelly didn’t bother waiting for Ryan to ask what he meant.

“I guess I feel bad that I don’t treat her better, don’t love her the way she should be loved. Been with her so long, don’t really know how to not be. That’s why I said that shit I guess—guilty. Don’t make it right.” Ryan was quiet. “That’s a really nice story about you and your girl. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for ya.”

 

They had passed Regina a couple hours earlier; the sun was well behind them now and the road didn’t seem to touch the horizon any closer than it had that morning. It seemed like they had seen a hundred welcome signs and as many saying thanks for visiting, come back soon.

“I’m feeling tired, maybe we can make camp a bit early tonight. I have some hot dogs in the cooler and there’s a quart of whiskey under the seat. We could have a fire and get an early start tomorrow.”

“Sounds good.”

They pulled off the road in an empty campground near the sign signaling the Manitoba border that was shaped like the province. They had a fire going in no time and were eating blackened hotdogs covered in mustard off the end of long sticks. The whiskey went down hot and the campfire burned the denim against Ryan’s shins. They were talking easy again and Kelly told Ryan the story of nearly getting run down by a bull, and how he had read Tom Sawyer over and over a hundred times as a boy.

“It was the only book I read for as long as I can remember.”

“You ever read Huck Finn?” asked Ryan.

“Not till last year.”

“As a part of the PhD?” Ryan said sarcastically.

The whiskey made this all very funny and they laughed until the alcohol burn bubbled up into the back of Ryan’s throat. Ryan said his favorite book was The Princess Bride and Kelly called him a fairy, taking it back even as it was just out of his mouth. Kelly’s favorite movie was Mad Max and Ryan lied and said his favorite was Psycho instead of the truth—Muriel’s Wedding.

“What’s your favorite song?” asked Ryan, for the first time hearing the drunk in his own voice. Kelly answered without a moment’s thought,

“‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’, Guns n’ Roses.”

“Really?” said Ryan as he passed the whiskey.

“Without a doubt. That guitar riff is the sound of love.”

Ryan cocked his head back and looked at Kelly, not quite believing he had heard him right.

“I’ll fucking show you, city boy,” said Kelly, getting to his feet and staggering towards the pickup truck. He turned the key and some B-side that Ryan didn’t know the name of blared out the open door.

The melody spread into the night, out between the ground and the heavy clouds above like milk —thin and smooth. Ryan was standing, though he couldn’t remember getting up.

“Wait, I have to find it,” Kelly said as he started to scan the tape with his legs hanging out of the truck. Ryan listened skeptically to the crunch of the fast-forward button, and then the tiny bursts of drums, guitar and Axl’s raspy and whiney voice. Finally, Kelly shouted from inside the truck, “Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes!”

There was silence for a second. Kelly stood up and pointed back at the stereo with his mouth open, his eyes closed and his face tilted up at the sky. Then it started—Slash’s guitar riff with its rise and fall, sharp, sweet—electric. Kelly stopped pointing at the stereo, but his eyes remained closed and he smiled.

“My God,” Ryan paused, “you might be right.” He felt warm; this time it wasn’t the whiskey. Axl Rose’s voice pierced the air, and that riff rippled out into the impossibly vast sky over the Great Plains. The melody spread into the night, out between the ground and the heavy clouds above like milk —thin and smooth. Ryan was standing, though he couldn’t remember getting up. They both stood, ten meters apart, barely swaying, until the song ended. Nothing around them but the fire, the truck and a line of bushes at the far side of the campground. Everything else was flat and infinite.

Stumbling forward, Kelly drunkenly exclaimed, “If anyone—ever—makes me feel like that guitar riff —I’ll marry their ass right there.”

“Fair enough,” said Ryan, taking a big swig of whiskey, sitting down again and sliding another hot dog onto his roasting stick.

Ryan was surprised at how drunk he had let himself get, too drunk to confidently piss through the spoon, and was thankful that the bushes were tall enough that Kelly couldn’t tell if he was standing or squatting when he was behind them. Every time he got up he was nervous that Kelly might come with him; he tried to time it so he was always pissing a few minutes after Kelly had just gone, sometimes holding it uncomfortably long while he waited.

They talked well into the night, until the whiskey was gone. Kelly stood up across the fire from Ryan and sloppily pulled open his jeans. He grabbed his dick in his right hand, still holding the empty whiskey bottle in the left and pissed all over the campfire, which hissed and smoked, leaving only a few red coals underneath the black wet wood. Kelly tucked his dick back into his pants and staggered towards their unpitched tents on the ground by the truck without doing up his fly.

Kelly had his tent pitched and was inside in no time, while Ryan drunkenly fumbled with his old tent in the dark. He was sure there was a section of pole missing, but couldn’t figure out which one. He dug in the cab of the truck for the flashlight he had seen earlier and spilled an old cup of coffee that was sitting on the dash all over his shirt. Then he hit his head as he stood back up.

“What the fuck are you doing?” yelled Kelly from inside his tent.

“Nothing. Having a little trouble setting this thing up.”

“Leave that piece of shit alone and just sleep in here.”

Now that he wasn’t by the fire, Ryan was noticing how cold it was. Much colder than it had been since he had gotten back to Canada. The warmth of the whiskey was wearing off and he suddenly felt exhausted.

“Well?” prompted Kelly.

Too drunk to do anything else, Ryan got in Kelly’s tent and laid his sleeping bag out.

“Christ, that bag is paper thin, you’ll freeze to death if it gets any colder tonight,” said Kelly. “Lay it down underneath and we can zip mine into it. It’s good in -15.”

“No, I’ll be alright,” said Ryan.

“Suit yourself.” Kelly turned over and faced the wall of the tent.

Ryan left his jeans on, but pulled his wet shirt off before lying down on his stomach. The zipper on his sleeping bag was broken and he wished that he had thought to face the opening away from Kelly for a small amount of privacy. Kelly started to snore almost immediately and Ryan fell asleep soon after.

 

When Ryan woke up on his side, the knuckles of Kelly’s right hand were resting gently on his lower back. He didn’t move. He lay there still, awake with his eyes closed until Kelly rolled over onto his other side. Ryan had two long scars under his nipples from the surgery. One was almost invisible; the other resembled a red and twisted earthworm—it looked angry and sore. Not wanting Kelly to see it, Ryan sat up and pulled his coffee-stained shirt back on.

“Where’d you get the scar?” asked Kelly as he yawned and stretched out.

“Shark bite,” joked Ryan.

“Sure city boy.” Kelly pulled back the sleeping bag and scratched the thick line of hair leading into his boxers. Inside his loose shorts, covered in tiny sailboats, Kelly’s cock was hard. He was staring at Ryan. Ryan didn’t move. Kelly grabbed Ryan’s hand and guided it onto his dick—both of them shaking slightly. Ryan held it gently at first and then grasped it hard, laying his body next to Kelly’s and stroking as Kelly grunted and arched his back. Ryan’s mind wandered—wondering if this was Kelly’s first time, wondering if he should have seen this coming, looking back for a clue. Ryan was surprised by how wet he was and how hard he felt; his jeans heavy and full despite the absence of the dick he always wished he’d had. His train of thought was interrupted by something he hadn’t expected—Kelly grabbed the back of his head and kissed him long and hard, his breath still burning from the whiskey. Kelly rolled his weight on top of Ryan and starting to grab at the button on his jeans. Ryan bucked and pushed Kelly off him, accidentally kneeing his balls. Kelly rolled over onto his side barely making a sound and Ryan scampered out into the morning. The campsite was quiet for nearly ten minutes. Kelly stayed in the tent and Ryan leaned against the bumper of the truck trying not to throw up the burning knot of cheap whiskey and hotdogs inside him. He wondering how fucked he would be if he had to walk to the nearest town. Then he looked down and noticed that inside the airbrushed Jesus fish on Kelly’s front plate, it said “n’chips”.

Kelly rolled out of the tent dressed in the same denim he had worn the two days before, his boots already done up.

“No time for coffee. We should get going; we didn’t make very good time yesterday.”

“Sure,” said Ryan, only half looking at him.

At some point he would have to say, Turn here, this is it, thank you– something. It was the kiss that seemed strange. It was the kiss that was hanging silently between them.

They pulled down the tent and got on the highway. Ryan waited for Kelly to say something about it—waited hours. He watched Winnipeg go by and wished he had looked up the distances, wished he knew how far Winnipeg was from the Ontario border, and how far the Ontario border was from Toronto. Wished he knew more than just that it was damn far. He wished he knew what Kelly was thinking. Or even why he was going to Toronto in the first place. It didn’t seem possible to ask—so they were quiet. They were quiet until sundown, only speaking at drive-thru windows.

“What do you want?”

“Number one with a Coke.” That sort of thing.

Somehow the darkness made it feel quieter—made the quiet feel more strange. The light reflecting off the lines in the road was making Ryan’s eyes burn. He was starting to think that they might make it the whole way without saying anything else at all, and didn’t know if that was better. He imagined them floating into Toronto at night on the Gardiner Expressway, passing the old Exhibition grounds and seeing the tower gaudily lit up like a glow stick. At some point he would have to say, Turn here, this is it, thank you – something. It was the kiss that seemed strange. It was the kiss that was hanging silently between them.

“I’m not a faggot,” said Kelly. The word faggot filled the truck and Ryan wanted to open the window a crack in the hopes that the word would slowly seep out. He didn’t.

“I don’t care if you’re gay, Kelly,” Ryan said flatly.

“Well I’m not, I just get horny in the morning.”

Ryan wanted to play along, wanted to say Yeah, me too—but he couldn’t.

“Sorry I nailed you in the balls.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The car made its way around a sharp bend and Ryan thought they must be in Ontario by now, wondering if he had missed the sign, wondering if it was also shaped like the province.

“Don’t even know what I would have done if I had got your pants open, never touched a dick that wasn’t my own,” said Kelly, his voice sounding more like it had the day before. Ryan didn’t often feel like a piece of him was missing; mostly he felt just fine with the way things were. But he felt it now and he had felt it that morning. He had wanted it all to continue and he wanted to tell Kelly what he was afraid he would have found out in the end. But he didn’t tell him. Instead Ryan just smiled and said, “How different could it really be?”

They both laughed.

 

Ryan had missed the sign for Ontario; they drove well into the night and by the time they set up camp Ryan felt weak and drained from the day’s tense silence. The night seemed darker now that they were surrounded by trees instead of open field. There were so many stars that they left the tents in the truck and slept on either side of the fire in the open. Ryan woke up several times in the night from the cold just as Kelly was feeding a new log to the fire. The air smelled like Christmas trees, and the buzz of the forest, bugs and leaves in the wind, felt so loud against the silence of that day.

 

Kelly woke Ryan up by wiggling the end of his foot through his sleeping bag. The sun was only just casting blue up from behind the horizon and the fire smoked—but it didn’t do much else. Swirls of hot breath came out of Kelly’s mouth as he said, “Come on city boy, you can sleep more in the truck.”

Ryan slept against the passenger window until the sun was high in the sky. For the first time it was shining through the side of the truck—they had started to bend around Lake Superior and were heading south.

“I got you a coffee at the last stop; might be cold by now.”

It was, but Ryan thanked him and drank it anyway. Northern Ontario looked like a different world than the one the sun had set on. Giant shoulders of the Canadian Shield naked, the rest covered with scabs of moss in thousands of colours —all somewhere between red and yellow and yellow and green—the leaves doing their best to be as spectacular, but failing miserably this early in September. That day Kelly mostly asked about Toronto and Ryan became increasingly excited about being home for the first time in years. There were long stretches of highway where nothing was said, but when they did speak it came easy and the silence was different this time than it had been before. It was just there. In the way their clothes were part of the landscape of the truck—the blue of Kelly’s denim shirt just part of the view and the silence just like the air.

It was late when they hit Toronto and the city looked strange to Ryan. Looking at it was like trying to notice the changes in your own face as you age. Some things stood out—glaring, like a new monstrous glass-fronted condo, or the way the billboards along the highway had multiplied. Other things—a new highway exit, a new convenience store, the way the trees were taller on his parent’s street—those things he noticed without knowing it.

When the truck stopped Ryan felt seasick.

“Thanks for lift,” he said and he handed Kelly the 200 dollars they had agreed upon for gas before they left.

“No problem,” said Kelly, sliding the bills into his left breast pocket.

Ryan was disappointed that he had not thought of something to say in advance—anything at all.

He gathered his things, his ball cap, his lighter that was sitting in the cup holder and a half-finished crossword puzzle off the dash. He looked around the cab of the truck for anything else as Kelly sat with his hands in his lap, the engine still running. Ryan got out of the truck, grabbed his duffle bag off the flatbed and dropped it on the pavement. He reached back into the car and held out his hand.

“Thanks again.”

Kelly shook Ryan’s hand with both of his and Ryan thought of the sound of him jerking off that first night, but also of Kelly’s apology on the second day, and the way his forearms seemed to burst out of his denim sleeves. He shut the door and Kelly pulled off down the road right away before Ryan even stepped back from the truck. Ryan wondered where he was going. Halfway up the block, the truck jerked and drifted to the left for second, then righted itself before the opening riff of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” ripped into the air and drifted back at Ryan. The truck reached the end of the block and Kelly honked the horn as he turned the corner. Ryan smiled and stood next to his duffle bag under the streetlights as the song got quieter and quieter. He stood there for a good long while after it was gone just looking at the end of road.