The Path of Most Resistance Page 6

  It was just as well that Fran was still sleeping, Art thought. He was already downstairs by then and pulling on his long winter boots. She’d only be talking about his blood sugar and trying to sit him down for breakfast or some foolishness. I can hear her now, he thought, “Just wait — a piece of toast doesn’t take that long. You can certainly sit down and have a piece of toast.”

  As if I could sit still even waiting for the toast to pop up, he thought, listening to the whine of the tax man’s tired old blower somewhere down the street, hard at work.

  Art had been out in the shed the night before, already able to feel the cold damp of the approaching storm in the night air. He wondered for a moment if he felt he could feel the incoming weather more clearly because he’d already seen it on the news, the young meteorologist cupping her hands around either side of the approaching front as if she could hold it up like clay and touch it, shape it. There was, he thought, almost a reverence in her voice.

  He had changed the oil in the blower, of course. Well, more drained what was left and added plenty of new, because, while it was a workhorse, the blower smoked like crazy, a heavy blue cloud that Art secretly loved the smell of. He pulled and gapped the spark plug, scraping it clean, and checked to see that he had extra shear pins in case one broke. Then he opened the shed door and started the blower, marching it around the small workspace to be sure that the wheels were engaging. It was far too heavy for him to move without the powered tracks, and, he thought, it didn’t matter how smoothly the thing was running if he couldn’t get it out of the shed and into the snow.

  He would like to have been able to take it out into the yard, just to push it face-first into a snowbank to see how the auger was working. The front of the blower had its share of dents and dings, and it would be nice to know if the blade was brushing the housing anywhere and whether the snow would travel loosely and evenly up through the chute and out. But there hadn’t been enough snow for that; it had been cold enough, January already, but there hadn’t been more than a few light snowfalls.

  Art had watched bigger systems rumble toward them on the weather channel, watched them either waste away hundreds of miles before they got near St. John’s or else warp and veer out to sea, either too far north or too far south to have any effect.

  Before he left the shed, he took a rag and wiped the small amount of oil he’d spilled around the filler cap, and then rubbed away at the sooty dark triangle on the side where the exhaust blew back from the muffler. It was a mark he could never fully remove no matter how often he tried, a combination of stain and burnt paint from the muffler’s heat.

  He’d turned off the light with the blower sitting just inside the shed door, facing out. Ready to go, he thought, the moment Fran woke him up.

  Before he’d gone to bed, Art had opened the curtains to see if there was any sign of the impending storm, but there was no snow falling then, just the orange of the street lights reflecting back from the heavy, low cloud. It certainly looked like snow, he thought.

  He lay in bed and planned the whole campaign in his head. One straight cut from the shed down between the houses to the street, five short cuts for the rudimentary driveway where they didn’t park anyway, and then two straight side-by-side runs across in front of the house until he got to the telephone pole that marked the property line between their house and Mary Tobin’s.

  Mary lived by herself: Art, dressed in his snowmobile suit and heavy mitts, dusted head to toe with powdered snow, would do the two long cuts in front of Mary’s place, clearing the sidewalk, and he always touched his hand to his fur hat when Mary heard the blower, looked out the window, and waved her thanks.

  Fran thought the whole thing was hilarious.

  “She’s twenty years younger than you are, Art. I think she could handle shovelling her own walk,” Fran had said. But that wasn’t really the point, Art had thought, although he didn’t say it out loud. It had much more to do with the tax man, with his greasy smooth-handedness — and with Art himself.

  “You’re like a couple of old stags,” Fran said, “trying to prove you’ve still got horns on your heads.” The way she said it was almost kind, but it had the same feel, Art thought, as one of your parents reaching out and ruffling your hair, even after you were thirteen or fourteen, far too old for that to be easy, comfortable contact. He knew Fran didn’t mind any of it, because sometimes when it snowed, he’d come downstairs and find she’d laid out his hat with the earflaps and his long mitts right by the back door, ready to go, the kind of casual mess that, usually, she couldn’t stand.

  The rules for the whole thing, he thought, were simple. You can’t look like you’re rushing, and you have to do all of your own walk, even the driveway, first. Neatly, too, no shortcuts. You weren’t heading out to do Mary’s walk: no, you were clearing your own walk — Mary’s was just a courtesy afterwards, never the obvious goal. Neither he nor the tax man had ever put the rules into words, but they knew them just the same.

  Other things about their approaches were different. Art blew his snow straight out into the street, even though the city said he wasn’t allowed to. He always had and he always would. The way he figured it, if the city hadn’t gotten around to sending a plow down their side street, then Art wasn’t causing anyone any trouble.

  The tax man had complained about that — in fact, Art was pretty sure that the tax man had actually called City Hall about it, because one year, a city supervisor’s truck had nosed slowly down their street after the plows had gone by, and Art was sure the driver had been looking for any sign of misbehaviour.

  The tax man was handicapped by the fact that he followed the city’s rules — that he only blew the snow onto the snowbanks on the side of the street, meaning he had to stop moving to adjust the chute to keep the snow from falling on the road. The tax man also blew snow into the narrow front yards, sometimes so close to the fronts of the houses that they ended up skimmed with snow, like badly staged and tacky Christmas cards.

  Art never did that, but he didn’t tell the tax man why. It was because the blower sometimes picked up older snow with road salt already in it, the kind of thing that could kill front-yard gardens like Mary Tobin’s. He knew that because Mary had told him.

  The tax man had one other disadvantage, something that Art was counting on.

  The tax man had an extra house. And a dilemma. The Fords lived directly next to Mary Tobin. The tax man, on the other side, was one house further down. Between the tax man and Mary Tobin was a big, set-back house that had had a succession of owners, each subsequent one paying a new higher price for the property and each sale driving up tax assessments all along the street each time. At the moment, it was owned by the Tofflers, a pair of SUV-owning professionals whose approach to snow seemed to be putting their SUV into reverse, piling backwards out into the street, and hoping that it would all be melted to a manageable level by the time they got home.

  The tax man could make a quick double cut across the front of the Tofflers’ house, or else he could loop out his own driveway, deliberately and obviously bypassing their place with a quick run down the street, and cut back in at Mary Tobin’s.

  The tax man had already soured things there by suggesting that maybe the Tofflers might want to chip in on gas some time, an offer they found baffling and a little insulting because they hadn’t asked him to clear their sidewalk in the first place.

  It was even more complicated for the tax man because the city had downgraded their street: it was no longer a snow priority because the city councillor who had lived on their street had lost the last election. The plows now came later and the tax man, even if he chose to take the street, would have to cut a path, even out on the roadway.

  It was, Art thought as he went out the door, all about strategy. Tucked in there, too, was the element of surprise. The tax man, hunkered down behind his own noisy machine, wouldn’t even know Art was out and working until Art turned the corner onto the street. The other side of the coin was that
Art couldn’t be sure just how much of a head start the tax man had actually gotten until he rounded the corner and saw him at work. Art knew that stomping down through the fresh snow to check, to sneak a look around the edge of the house instead of clearing the tight, clean path to the front, was cheating for sure.

  Art opened the shed door, pulling it back hard against the weight of the drifted snow. He checked the gas, even though he already knew the blower was full, and pressed the electronic start. The blower started immediately. That’s how it is when you take care of your equipment, Art thought, looking back at the single row of his own deep footprints from the back door. It was deep, all right: deep and powdery and still blowing around in a growing wind, the sharp edges of his boot prints near the house already softening and filling in.

  He shifted the blower into gear and it gave a sudden, eager lurch forward, the tone of the engine changing as Art engaged the auger and snow began to fly.

  He realized right away that the snow was deeper than he had expected it to be and that, during the night, the wind had swung around the side of the house, packing the snow into tight, waved drifts. The snow blower roared and the wind roared back, blowing snow into his face, the flakes catching and freezing in the bushy forests of his eyebrows.

  It was hard work forcing the blower ahead, keeping the line straight, and Art was already sweating a little when he reached the corner, the blower passing the porch so that he could look down the street toward the tax man’s house.

  The tax man, Art realized, was closer than he had expected. It was going to be tight. But it was better when it was tight, he thought.

  One winter, Art had managed to clear Mary Tobin’s walk after every single storm. The tax man had been laid up after surgery, some incomprehensibly complicated thing that involved hauling great long ropes of hollow veins out of his leg and then putting them back somewhere else in his chest. That year, Art had even cleared the tax man’s walk a couple of times. But it wasn’t the same.

  He was happy, the following winter, to hear the growl of the tax man’s blower, to put down the cup of coffee he wouldn’t have poured if he had known the tax man was healthy again and hurry for the door to take up the challenge.

  The snow was still battering down and the tax man was chugging forward, his coat white with snow, blue smoke hanging around him for an instant before being snatched away by wind.

  Art had barely finished his own driveway, while the tax man was already finished at his own house. In between gusts of drifting snow, Art could even see where the snowbank to the street had been cut cleanly. The tax man was heading along the sidewalk in front of the Tofflers’, the arc of snow from the discharge up high into the bare black branches of the Tofflers’ maple tree. Art knew that the tax man had seen him by then and knew he was in the lead, eager to press the advantage.

  Fran must be up, Art thought, glancing at the now-opened curtains in the bedroom upstairs. That meant there would be eggs and sausage when he came back in, right at the kitchen table as soon as he’d stripped out of his overalls and jacket. He imagined closing the door against the buffeting wind, the small gasp of snowflakes that would blow in around him and vanish, melting into droplets before they even had a chance to flutter down to the floor.

  I could just give up now, Art thought, but it was a fleeting, almost treacherous idea. “Fords don’t give up”: he’d said it, and his father had said it before him, but Art was old enough to know that many things are in the eye of the beholder, that it was possible to dress surrendering up as good judgment. He knew he could find some sort of justification for almost any direction he decided to take.

  He pushed the snow blower into the snow in front of him, taking advantage of things, he thought, that less experienced men would not recognize. For instance, there was a small natural dell behind the one telephone pole in front of his house, a shadow from the prevailing winds that left a small, two-foot span virtually snowless. Those same winds would also cut a rushing channel up between his house and Mary Tobin’s. Sometimes, there would be a couple of feet of snow on other parts of the street, and the gap between the houses would be swept so clean he could see the points and angles of the gravel.

  The tax man, meanwhile, was wrestling with deeper snow deposited by the swirl of wind from across the street. There was a spot there, Art knew, where you could even see the standing dervish of it, a little cyclone of spinning wind that captured snow and dropped it for no other reason than the unchanging geometry of the neighbouring houses.

  Art knew it would take every single possible advantage to catch the tax man, who had the first cut across the Tofflers’ property done and the second well started.

  The tax man was still in the lead, although not by much, when his blower crossed onto Mary’s sidewalk. Art saw the tax man’s blower nose past the beginning of Mary’s stone wall and he began pushing his own snow blower so hard that the tracks slipped forward on the slushy base snow, the whole weight of the machine moving ahead from the strength of Art’s rapidly tiring arms and legs.

  Art was seeing spots in front of his eyes that were surrounded, just at the edge of his vision, with a kind of darkening, like curtains left covering the edges of a window.

  The snow blowers came together almost exactly at the foot of Mary Tobin’s front staircase. Art could see that the tax man was also breathing hard, and thought about telling him that a guy with a bunch of straggly old leg-veins packed into his chest should be taking things a little easier. But he didn’t say anything, mostly because his ears were roaring with the effort and because he didn’t think he had enough breath left to get the words out.

  There was still one cut left to do in front of Mary’s house, but the snow blowers were sitting nose to nose in the first narrow path. Neither man reached down to shift his own machine into reverse. Blue smoke swirled around them and then was grabbed by the wind and flung away.

  “I’ve got all day here,” Art shouted over the noise of the two running snow blowers. There was sweat on his forehead: melted snow was running down the sides of his face.

  “So do I,” the tax man shouted back.

  Over the wind, there was the sound of a snowplow in the distance, its blade harsh against the pavement, getting closer.

  At the front of the snow blowers, only inches apart, the two opposing augers spun furiously, angry teeth in hungry mouths.

  Neither giving an inch.

  The Path of Most Resistance

  Dear Sara, (I don’t know. Is that even right to call you that anymore? Let’s say it is, at least as far as I’m concerned — Nell.)

  I can feel the sun already warming the skin of my arms, even though it’s only just reached the top of the hills, and the air still has that cool feeling left over from night. The sun is low enough right now — cutting parallel to the ground and through the constant scrim of pollution — that everything is far yellower than it should be, the reds and pinks of flowers muted in a way that they will not be after the sun gets higher and whiter.

  The bees are out already, stumbling stupid in the air, and the roosters have mostly stopped crowing. The amplified public exercise class in the town centre has ended, the instructor’s set of movements going only to eight — ocho — and back down to uno, so it’s easy to imagine they must be beginners, a class where the instructor doesn’t want to push them those last two steps to ten. I think of them on their mats, puffing and sweating even though it’s February. We could have been there, stretched out beside each other on our own mats, the two girls against the world we used to be, a tag team, always ready to watch each other’s backs. But now I’m here alone.

  I’m in the middle of Mexico in the exact town we had picked, Tepoztlan, tucked in between ragged, lump-topped hills of volcanic pumice and hardened lava. The stone hills have been solid long enough for the trees to start to grow over them again. The hills stand out in only two dimensions against the flat matte sky. The tallest trees stretch along the very top spine of the hill in single file, l
ike they are actually walking somewhere. Like they have some urgent place to go or at least some urgent need to see something new. So different, that line of walking trees, always headed somewhere else even though it’s obvious that they can’t do anything of the kind.

  I haven’t been here long enough to get my Spanish right. But I know enough of the language to know almost every time I’ve made a mistake, and not because of the behind-a-hand half-smile my mistakes create, but because I actually realize, just as the words leave my mouth, that I’ve messed up.

  I know which churches ring which bells, although I’m not always sure why, and I know my way to the market and how much things cost and the rare occasions when a vendor at one of the stalls is trying to take advantage.

  And Sara, I want you to know that it’s everything we thought it would be, everything we dreamed it would be and more.

  Right now, there are hummingbirds flitting back and forth amid a huge range of flowers — there are reds and purples and yellows and it’s still only February. There are plants blooming that I only smell at night, with flowers so discreet that I can’t even decide where the smells are coming from. The birds are all different, too — there’s a sort of hummingbird sitting right over me now, making a racket but sitting still enough that I can see the sunlight coming right through the long curved needle of his beak. And there’s some kind of fat, pink-bellied warbler that has been sitting in a leafless tree for ages, turning occasionally, and letting out a short little squawk every now and then like an important idea has just occurred to him.