"In Flight"
(Published in Canadian Author, 1995, and in Sweet Like Saltwater, 1999)
by Raywat Deonandan

Kamla Begum was not a tall woman, but, being straight-backed and queenly, she often convinced observers otherwise. Such an illusion was not possible, though, when she was hunched behind the wheel of a tops- down MG, hurtling down the highway like a banshee on speed.

What had mother said? Come na, bibi, we go all stand like Cyclops when kingdom come. Or something like that. Ma was always blabbering on about something, from haemorrhoids to the Archangel Azraeel, something to incense great flappings of arms and sputterings of saliva.

The MG slipped along the roadway, much like a greased bullet through a gun's barrel; or like a sheathed penis along the vaginal canal; or anal canal --mustn't be knocking alternative lifestyles, now.

Kamla had driven now for four and two-thirds hours away from the city, refusing to even glance at the fuel gauge. When it dies, it dies! That was the way, the path. No more always-looking- to-the-future-'cause-with-no-future-what-you-got? Time to play the game, roll the dice, take your best shot, roll with the punches, don't you know.

Her bonnet, wrapped haphazardly but oh-so-sexily about her chocolate neck, fluttered in the wind. One little edge, white laced softness adorned with golden tassels, persistently struck her left cheek.

Oh so annoying.

Tap tap tap. It's amazing how slight physical sensations can trigger useless memories. A toothbrush slips off a sheening ivory tooth and collides into the tender inside wall of a little girl's cheek. A tent is blown away by ghostly forest winds, and the gentle rain drums softly on the side of its sleeping inhabitant's face. Tap tap.

Jehangir's voice, strangely feminine despite his steely thigh hairs, and the manly muscles of his lower abdomen: "you don't have to do this if you don't want to..." But she had taken him in her mouth, unaffected.

Tap tap tap.

She pressed harder on the accelerator, wishing that the MG had a manual transmission, and not an old lady's automatic. Her right hand spasmed like a headless turkey, grasping hopelessly for a stick- shift: a kind of automotive penis-envy.

She felt that her heels were dragging along the pavement like in a Flintstones cartoon. She had hit the brakes instead, instinctively. And the car ground to a halt.

Her head snapped back violently, thudding dully against the headrest. Whiplash. That's what people always have in car accidents, right? She massaged the back of her neck, hoping to incite some pain, but failing. One good lawsuit, bibi, and we got plenty money for doctorin' school. Pa wasn't a lawyer, but he certainly had the necessary lack of integrity to have made a fine one. Even if she had whiplash, who could she sue? The Ministry of Transportation? Baapur‚!

There was smoke coming out of somewhere. She flowed out of the MG and began the walk to the nearest service station.

Won't that sissy-boy Jehangir be surprised, na? to find his precious oedometer rolled forward a couple million miles. Won't his oh-so-proper and tight progenitors be blasted away into the realm of the irretrievably shocked; won't Ma and Pa suck their chocolate thumbs and count their darling pennies when the lawyers' bills and bail- bond fall on their doorstep, na? And won't the whole suckly brown gaggle shake their flabberly jowls and mumble in shame when Kamla-bibi was finally seen exploding down the parkway on a Harley, clutching a black boy's muscular love-handles.

All she had to do was find a cooperative black boy. And a motorcycle.

They were all disappointments, every last one. Towing the bloody line, they were; playin' the game; repeatin' the words; fulfilling the fucking roles. Even Jehangir, a jello-spined lower tetrapod cloaked in a handsome man's evil smile, had ended up being one of them. His only original thoughts involved things to do with his pecker.

Even the service station was a disappointment. Too many neon signs and "fine family dining establishments". Where was the broken-down washroom, the rickety old-timer on the rocking chair, the boarded-up general store run by the inbred banjo-plucking retard? Life's not a film, bibi. No, Pa, but it's not supposed to be a bloody sitcom either, right?

"Your life's a Virginia Woolf novel," Jehangir once said. "Except that that old faggot Quentin Crisp is playing the lead role!" Slap! Jehangir could be a real shit sometimes. Thank God this was Canada, where a girl didn't have to marry some foul-mouthed self-important know-it-all just because her parents liked him; just because he had a future. Thank God she was well within her rights to drive to nowhere, far as she wanted, far from hairy peckers and doctorin' school, and nobody would judge her for it.

Thank God.

"Can I help you?"

"Car trouble," she said. "Back eastward, less than a mile." She sized him up good: young, scruffy, muscular. Not too bright, but willing to please. And not black, either, but the next best thing: white. There was something about the greasy cover-alls, the subtle odour of tobacco smoke mixed with grease... Reminded her of a Benetton ad, but this was no Marky Mark. This guy probably couldn't even spell "Mark". Then again, could Marky?

"I guess I could take a look," he said, scratching his unwashed head. Some kind of impeded thought process seemed to be taking place, hindered, no doubt, by the intrusion of various hair- consuming parasites into his cerebral cortex. "Okay, let's go."

"Walk?" Kamla asked.

"Yeah," he said. "Not far, right? You want I should take the pick-up?"

She shook her head and sighed inwardly. No motorcycle. And beneath the neon glare of the Tim Horton's sign, she saw more clearly that he was, indeed, considerably less than Marky Mark. Where were the Springsteen videos of the world? Where were the unfound flowers cloaked in mechanics' garb, the unjudging grateful princes cast unto poverty by the inequities of global economics and biased monetary policy?

They walked, wordlessly. The occasional ruffled pant-leg would brush up against Kamla's bare flesh, and she would once more see "Markisms" in her rescuer, perhaps roused by those uncontrollable spurts of event-provoked memories.

Got to break loose now, Kam, the pecker had said. Got to do it all before medical school, you know. "Why?" she had asked him, the prick. "Because there's no life after school?" 'Cause when we're married, you can't go 'round ogling boys in nightclubs. "But I don't like ogling boys in nightclubs, you prick." Then he had wanted to do it right there by the side of the highway. Maybe it was he who liked ogling boys in nightclubs, eh?

"You just snapped this doo-dad," the mechanic said, or something like that. He was bent over the MG, left leg crooked in a knowing stance. She surveyed his worker's body, defined even through the cover-alls. She pictured his love-handles, lithely muscled yet soft and curved the way they should be. The vision was in sharp contrast to Jehangir's gruff yet brittle form.

He pulled something out of the engine, then replaced it with something else. "She'll run now." He was smiling and sweaty, focused and almost alert, as if that painstaking thought process begun earlier had finally completed its course.

"Thanks," Kamla said, then muttered some indistinct offer of payment.

"No charge. Really." He handed her a petite cardboard rectangle. A business card! Roy Hawking, Mechanic. On the back was scribbled his phone number. "You look like the kinda girl who can appreciate a hog..."

"Excuse me?"

"A motorcycle?" His countenance, for a brief moment, returned to its original state of vacuity. "I got a Suzuki. Gimme a call, we go ridin'. Right?" His hands were forward, emulating the driving position on a cycle, and his lips were on the verge of making motorcycle sounds.

"Sure," Kamla said. She climbed into the MG and waved goodbye to Roy Hawking. She watched him walk off lazily, not a rushed cell in his being; certainly no hurried thought in his head. And she turned the car around, and headed back toward the city.