***
It had been a dry winter and the ground was already dusty and ready to be airborne by the time the wind started blowing down on the prairie from the Rocky Mountains. It was March which meant the wind was like a hurricane every afternoon. That’s what the day was like the Saturday we planned to celebrate the twins’ seventeenth birthday. I worked a short, four hour dayshift and by the middle of the afternoon I was sitting at the TacoTown staff table wondering what I’d do to pass the three hours left before Wayne, Crystal, and Darren were finished work for the day.
So far, the twins’ birthday wasn’t going very well. Wayne had come home the afternoon before with a small, innocent-looking bandage fixed above his upper lip.
“He got his mole removed!” Crystal railed at me as they came through the TacoTown doors on Saturday morning.
I gasped. “His signature twin mole? It’s gone? No way!”
I leaned close to Wayne’s face and gawked at the tiny plaster left in the spot where his flat, brown mole used to stand on his face like a drawn-on beauty mark. Crystal still had hers, in exactly the same spot, lingering like a ghost of his.
“Crystal, come on,” he said, looking past me. “I already explained this to you. I cut it open with a razor just about every time I shaved. It’s not my fault that I grew up and our mole doesn’t work for me anymore.”
“But it was our trademark...”
“The sign of your twin-ship...” I added.
Wayne groaned. “No one should have to bleed from the face every morning in order to maintain a relationship with his sister. Sorry, but it’s asking too much.”
He was probably right. But Crystal spent our shift sulking anyway. It was a good thing there were three more hours for her to get used to Wayne’s new face before we all started trying to enjoy ourselves for the evening. The twins had invited Bert to come to their birthday party too and he sat with me at the staff table, smoking another cigarette. Crystal and Wayne walked by the kitchen door as Bert and I waited.
“Of course I didn’t arrange to get it removed on the day before our birthday on purpose,” Wayne was saying. “That’s just when the doctor could fit me in. He picked the time, not me. You don’t honestly think...”
Bert ground out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. “Come on, Mack,” he said. “I don’t have much of an appetite left for listening while they sort this out.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We’re going to the farm so you can help me work on my car,” he told me.
Bert’s car was a drab white Mustang made during the doldrums of the car’s production years. He was constantly patching it together. Even I could tell that the car needed work – body work. Both the front and rear bumpers were crushed at the corners and one fender was marked with a long, blue scuff.
“Been in a few accidents, eh?” I remarked.
“Yeah. But,” Bert said, throwing the car into reverse and backing quickly out of his parking spot, “it’s not that I’m a bad driver.”
“It’s not?”
“Let me just say that if you looked as stupid in glasses as I do, you’d try to get by in life without wearing them too – even when driving.” He wheeled the car between the narrow rows of parked vehicles in the TacoTown lot. I squeaked like a leaky balloon as my side mirror nearly grazed the trailer hitch of a huge pickup truck as we passed it.
“Don’t be afraid to shout out anything you think I might not see. Your instincts are probably right on,” Bert instructed.
“Stop sign! Stop sign!”
Bert laughed as he stomped on the brake with one of his big, lion paws. “Atta girl!”
Somehow, we made it more or less safely all the way through the city. I called out alerts for pedestrians, red lights, oncoming cars, and whatever else I’d rather not see smashed. Finally, we reached the city limits where the traffic thinned and the roads widened into highways, heading into the country. We were on the opposite side of the city from Upton, in country I’d never seen before. As we drove faster and faster on our way to Bert’s family farm, I flipped open the glove box. Between the stacks of police accident reports, I found a bulky, brassy pair of eyeglasses like the ones my dad used to wear when I was a little kid.
Bert glanced at them. “So you found them, eh? Check it out. That’s what you get when your mom goes and buys you non-refundable, clearance-priced glasses frames while you’re off at school,” he explained.
I opened the yellow arms and perched Bert’s glasses on my own face. The view was instantly distorted and wobbly like I was looking out through a carnival mirror, not a windshield. “Bert, you are totally blind!”
He looked sideways and roared out a laugh at the sight of me wearing his enormous grandpa glasses. “Well, they still look better on you than they do on me,” he grinned.
I scoffed. “How would you know? You can’t even see me.” I turned in my seatbelt. “Hold still,” I warned as I slid the arms of the glasses behind his ears until the lenses properly covered his eyes.
Bert blinked, squinted, and then shuddered from behind his glasses. They were definitely dated but they looked better to me than a car crash. “It’s too late to bother with that anyway,” he said, flicking the glasses off his face. They landed on the floor somewhere. “We’re already here.”
He yanked on the steering wheel and veered into a gravel driveway that bent along an avenue of tall Manitoba maple trees. The old trees told the farm’s story. This was a part of the country where the native vegetation was hundreds and hundreds of miles of grass, not trees at all. It was shocking for me on first moving here from the coast to realize that the land was flat and open not because someone had cleared and groomed it but because that’s just what the earth looks like on the Great Plains in the centre of our continent. In this part of the land, trees only grow in river bottoms and where humans plant them. Some human must have been afoot planting trees along this gravel road years and years ago. Bert’s home wasn’t a new, modern factory farm. It was an old settler’s farm that had been worked by Bert’s tough, sunburnt family for generations. But there was no gambrel roofed red barn, no white picket fences set in pens around perfectly preened flocks of chickens, no quaint green meadows. This was a real, gritty, working family farm.
We drove past the little house flanked by long grass no one ever had time to mow. Finally, we lurched to a stop inside a vast, steel shed lit with hanging trouble lights and crowded with decades of tools and machinery.
Bert stepped out onto the dirt floor of the shed and wrinkled his nose. I didn’t know then that farm kids are often self-conscious of the smell of their yards when they bring visitors home. The spring wind whistled and rattled through the arching steel walls. On the flat wall near the doors was a large cork board covered with 4-H emblems, award certificates, blue and red ribbons, and a photo of Bert holding the tether of a pretty, young calf. Apparently, he had been some kind of super-star in the local 4-H Beef Club.
“So we won’t try anything too fancy on the car today,” he said, pulling the lever to pop the latch on the hood. “Just an oil change. You must have helped you dad with those a hundred times before, eh?”
“My dad change his own oil?” I laughed. “Never.”
“Your brother then?”
“Nope. Only you can teach me.”
Bert shook his head and muttered something about townies. He zipped a set of dusty blue coveralls over his clothes. “Here.” He tossed an identical coverall to me.
I caught it and held it up, expecting it to be much too long for me. To my surprise, it wasn’t. “Why does it say ‘Harm’ on the front?” I asked, reading from the oval patch stitched below the right shoulder.
“Because Harm is my dad’s name,” Bert growled.
“Cool name. He must be pretty short though,” I said as I pulled Harm’s coveralls over my shoulders.
“Only because he had polio when
he was a kid,” Bert explained. “He spent Christmas in an iron lung when he was ten years old. But he hasn’t lain down at all since then.”
I couldn’t tell if Bert was bragging or complaining.
He jerked his chin toward the back of the shed. “The grease pit’s over there,” he said. “I’ll hop down into it and you can drive the car over me.”
Of course, this proposition sounded shocking to me and the oil change had to be delayed while Bert explained there was a hole dug into the floor so people could get under a car to work on it without needing to use a hoist. Still, I was nervous as he ducked and waited for me to run over him. Once the car was in place – the wheels straddling the pit, the oil pan accessible – I sat in the dirt in Harm’s coveralls and kept Bert company while he narrated what he was doing as if I’d remember it all later. I passed him wrenches and rags and waited while he sat underneath the car watching the dirty oil drain out of his engine.
“It’s so cool out here, on your farm,” I told him. “You’re cool out here too – with your prize ribbons and tools and animals and this land. Where are all the animals anyway?”
“You don’t want to see them,” Bert called from underneath the car. “They reek.”
“They just smell the way they’re supposed to,” I reasoned.
“That’s true,” he allowed. “But they’re busy. So are we.”
“Right. So, like I was saying, it’s as if you’re living a double life. There are two Huberts. There’s Bert, who comes to work at his lame restaurant job in the city. And then there’s Hu, who operates heavy machinery and bullies livestock out here. Like, I bet your family wouldn’t even recognize you in a tacky uniform, wiping tables at TacoTown.”
Bert looked up at the oil pan and started to talk. I heard his voice. But I couldn’t understand anything he said.
“What the heck was that?” I asked.
“Dutch.”
“You’re bilingual? Why didn’t you tell me? That’s amazing!” I raved. “That takes having a double life to a whole new level. What did you say just now?”
“I said ‘just like you,’” Bert translated. “You must have a double life too.”
I startled. “What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes you’re Heather – the smart girl, newcomer, outcast in Upton. And then, at other times, you’re Mack – Crystal’s little friend, service industry labourer, and TacoTown hot-girl –”
“Bert!”
“Sorry, but it’s true. And I bet those people in Upton would be shocked to know it,” he said.
“Shocked is right. Look at me,” I demanded. “There must be something wrong with the water at TacoTown. Who in their right mind would ever think of me as pretty?”
“It’s not always prettiness that makes people attractive,” Bert explained, impatiently, as if it should be obvious to me. By now, he was wrenching the cap back onto the bottom of the oil pan. “It’s also how you behave and how you make people feel about themselves. Even with me, you make me feel like I really do want to quit smoking. But all of that’s nothing compared to your effect on those other two.”
I pulled my eyebrows together. “Which other two?”
“Can you go get the jugs of new oil out of the trunk? We should be ready to refill now. The trunk release lever’s right inside the driver’s door,” was Bert’s infuriating answer.
“Come on, Bert, I only count one guy with a crush on me at TacoTown.” It was true even after I went over the teenaged members of the other evening crew. I’d worked with all of them a few times when the schedule got jumbled or someone’s shift needed covering. There was Ian, the slick guy bound for business school next fall; Danny, the scruffy party-dude who always managed to be cheerful despite his chronic hangover; Guillaume, the French-speaking flirt from Quebec – they were all pleasant enough but it didn’t make sense that any of them could have a crush on me.
Bert looked up at my confusion and laughed at it from underneath his car. “Whatever you say, Mack. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Now go get the oil – please.”
I crossed my arms. “As if. You can consider yourself trapped under that car until you explain yourself.”
Bert wasn’t afraid. He leaned on his elbows at the edge of the grease pit in a leisurely, unhurried way and grinned up at me from ground level. “Go get the new oil. I’m going to have to wait here while it seeps all through the engine so we might as well get it started.”
“No new oil for you until I get some clarification,” I maintained.
“Fine,” Bert agreed. “Darren likes you, of course. That’s pathetically clear. But so does,” he passed me one last wrench, “his twin brother.”
I nearly dropped the wrench into the dirt. “That is ridiculous.”
“My new oil?” Bert reminded me.
I opened the trunk and carried the jugs to the front of the car. “Look, Wayne used to hate me. Then he learned to tolerate me, and then he became my friend. It’s a miracle we got that far. If it wasn’t for Crystal, it never would have happened. There’s no way our relationship could possibly go any further,” I shouted to him through the machinery under the hood as I stood pouring the new oil into the engine.
“Oh, come on,” Bert called back. “The whole I-hate-you-but-now-I-love-you relationship path is so common it’s a cliché. You see it on TV all the time. Are you using the funnel?”
“What funnel?” I was already twisting open the second jug of oil. “And I wouldn’t know anything about TV clichés. I don’t have time to watch TV anymore,” I said. “I don’t suppose Wayne himself ever actually told you he liked me.”
“Maybe not – but he doesn’t need to,” Bert insisted.
I wasn’t convinced. All this talk about Wayne’s imaginary crush on me was just Bert trying to amuse himself during a bit of routine car maintenance. Naturally, Wayne didn’t think of me as a real girl at all but more like a member of his family – a kind of second string sister who was a lot easier to beat in an arm wrestle than his real sister.
When the last of the new oil was poured into the engine, I came back to sit by the space where I could see Bert’s head beneath the car. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re Mormon so you won’t be going out with either of them,” he observed. “Drama like that might have been the end of their ‘twin brother’ days.”
“Can we please talk about something else?” I pleaded. “Something rooted in reality, maybe? Like, tell me about the Beef Club.”
“Mack, you wouldn’t date either of them, right?”
“I’m going to go check the oil level. We’ve waited long enough now, right?”
“Mack?”
“Fine, Hubert, fine,” I burst. “I won’t date Darren. And I certainly won’t date Wayne. I just won’t date anyone. Are ya happy? I’ll sit out there in the bleak half of my double life – in Upton – surrounded by all those Mormon boys who think they’re too good for me–”
“Oh, come on,” Bert interrupted. “I’m sure there’s someone – at least one person – in Upton who you connect with.”
I was about to scoff. I would have done it if a tiny barn swallow hadn’t swooped out of the high, dark apex of the shed and soared out the open door. I watched the bird fly away, all alone, into the blue sky outside. It was about the same size as a parakeet. I gulped back the sadness that had suddenly risen in my throat – a feeling like I wanted something that didn’t want me.
“Almost,” I answered. “But not quite. And that’s okay. I’m sure, in time, I’ll come to terms with spending my life alone. Dipstick?” I said, thrusting the car’s dipstick far enough into the grease pit for Bert to be able to read the oil level.
He nodded at it. “Don’t be mad at me, Mack. And don’t be sad either. You know that’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to make you unhappy. I’m trying to help.”
How can anyone stay mad at someone they’ve got trapped under a car?
I let myself smile at Bert. “I know. I know. And thanks, I guess. Now duck your head,” I warned him, “and I’ll roll this thing off of you.”