Читать книгу Dancing on a Razor - Kevin John White - Страница 11

3: Knowing

As I mentioned earlier, I was playing with freight trains by the time I was eight or nine years old. We were doing things around them, in them, and on top of them that give me nightmares every time I look at my son. When I see how small and vulnerable he is, I find it almost unbelievable (astonishing, really) that no matter how I slice it, I did the insane things I did on those trains when I was his age. (It’s the only thing that makes me grateful my son is into video games.) As I think about it, I’m amazed that I even survived into my double digits! That’s around when we started taking the longer trips on them. I couldn’t have been more than 11—maybe 12 at most.

We did a few short runs from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Regina, Saskatchewan, and back, and once we accidentally found a real sneaky way into the States. (I think we wound up in South Dakota.) I’m not sure where all we went—it’s kind of lumped together. Of course, this was all in the late sixties and early seventies when people weren’t so paranoid. It was simpler then. No electronics, no cellphones, very loose security, and riding was much more common back then. I guess it was because people weren’t running about trying to blow everything up like they are these days. Seems to be going on a whole lot more as time goes by.

Anyway, we just poked around on them and took them whichever direction they were headed. I did get lost a few times. Imagine an 11-year-old boy walking up to you and saying, “Excuse me, sir, but do you know where I am?” HA! (I shouldn’t laugh. Now that I think on it, I remember clearly doing that very thing.)

Getting on was the fun part—hiding out, chasing it down, the timing and all. Sometimes getting off when you needed to could be a bit tricky—knowing when and how to jump, how to land, how to roll. I never really got hurt, but I sure had the wind knocked out of me a few times. Got a few good scrapes and bruises too.

We actually did the things you see people doing in the movies. You know, running full tilt, jumping from car to car on top of a freight train that’s going well over 60 miles an hour (that’s like, fast, for you youngsters). Shoot, we were waving at the cars the train was passing on the highway as we ran along the top of the railcars. It’s actually easy to do. TV just makes it look all dramatic and stuff. Just don’t trip is all. I did. I don’t recommend it.

Doing it though, at 12 years old, howlin’ right into the wind at the top of my lungs, owning that train—it’s a hard memory to forget. I think railing is actually a form of … madness? It took about 20 odd years after I stopped riding before I could cross a rail line and my stomach didn’t pull all kinds of weirdness on me. Personally, now, at my age, I think the moment any child can both walk and talk at the same time they should be immediately declared legally insane and put under guard until age 20!

Anyway, two things happened to me on one of these trips that I’m still trying to understand. One thing’s sure: like the rest of what’s coming, they were pretty strange. Both had a huge impact on my life and played a major role in shaping me into something I certainly don’t understand.

When I was just turning 12 some guy about my age I’d never in my life laid eyes on before called my name as I was walking home from school. He walked right up to me out of the blue just like he knew me and says he and a friend of his were going to run away from home and did I want to go with them.

Now why in the world this character figured I’d go with them I’ll never know. It was only my second day at that particular school, so I knew that this guy couldn’t know too much about me. I was just a little puzzled as to why he would ask me in particular. I mean, did I have a blinking neon light on my forehead that read “Complete Total Whack Job” or something? But what surprised me even more (and I remember this very clearly) was how quickly I said, “Yeah, sure! When do we leave?” Just like that! I didn’t even think about it—as in, zero hesitation. (I was just like that in those days … hormones, maybe?)

Perhaps it was because I’d never done anything like that before—I mean run away for real—and at that age there really wasn’t very much I wouldn’t try to add a little drama and adventure to my life. What I couldn’t have known was that on this little adventure I would discover things about myself that would forever change my whole way of thinking and, in a very real way, define my existence for many years … well, for the rest of my life actually. Again, and I want to be crystal clear about this—I didn’t have any choice about what happened. I did nothing to seek this out. It was like all of it was there already, just waiting for me, marking time till I was ready for it to pop up.

At any rate, we all met and started to chew things over. After we had hashed things out we came up with what we figured was a good plan. It was bold and decisive, and the proof was in the pudding. It worked. This scheme of ours involved Greyhound buses, stealthy backtracking to throw off pursuers, hitchhiking, and hopping two different freight trains (by moonlight) and was just complicated enough to placate three young boys’ thirst for intrigue and adventure—a secret mission, to which we all swore undying allegiance. At its end, it would leave us on the outskirts of a humble northern Ontario town called Malachi (which I thought was very cool). Once there we would hop our last freight to a small isolated cabin on the shore of a frozen lake. That this was in the middle of February didn’t even enter the equation. We were Winnipeg boys! We didn’t even sneeze in Ontario weather!

Now, at the time I didn’t know it, but God caused the weather we encountered on this little odyssey (my very first time hitchhiking) to suddenly and quite unexpectedly turn unseasonably warm. Everyone we met kept commenting on it. “Well, we sure weren’t expecting weather like this right now!” I was, of course, completely oblivious to this little coincidence. All was simply as it should have been, as it always was. It was in fact a beautifully enchanting night.

It was perfect out, with not a single cloud in the vast night sky, and that far north the heavens indeed proclaimed the handiwork of God. All was black and white and sparkling silver. Not a breath of wind stirred, and the tall evergreen forest lay silent on all sides. Quiet. Still. Peaceful in a way I had never before known. The stars shone brilliantly all about us. Even the asphalt highway sparkled with every colour of the rainbow, reflecting in tiny treasures the bright moon above us. Diamonds—everywhere I looked! Riches beyond my wildest dreams! All I could hear was the muffled breathing of my companions and the quiet scrape of our boots on a black highway that stretched, it seemed, for an eternity before me. And oh! How that road seemed to call to me, stirring inside me a sense of freedom I had never before experienced and suddenly realized I had always longed for. That night the highway bore a child … and that naked soul was me. I had been reborn and belonged heart and soul to the road—like I was bewitched, enchanted in a way that moved me to my very core. For the first time in my life I felt freedom! And it was this feeling that kept me returning to the highway like my lover. It was as though I had been unchained, free to explore a vast new world.

Or so I thought … as things were to turn out, the highway was to become a most horribly cruel and diabolically treacherous mistress, and I would be lashed down that insatiable road into a deeper and deeper bondage, year after year—to my very death, and then back again. Hindsight is always 20/20.

At that time, Malachi had no population listed. The only thing that even gave it a name was a train station situated about 15 feet away from the rail line. So, with no roads into my friend’s cabin, the only way to get to us besides train would be by ski plane, or so we thought. Antarctica was overpopulated compared to this place. As I think on it, if any of us had been hurt up there …

I have no idea what in the world we were thinking. Three 12-year-olds way north in the deepest part of a northern Ontario winter with nothing but a few canned goods and an old .22 rifle? I think we actually had some hazy idea we were going to hunt all winter. The great woodland hunters! We actually did shoot a squirrel (with a .22?!), triumphantly carried it home, skinned it, and tried to eat it. I think we scraped the pitiful bits of flesh that were left on the poor thing into a can of beans and tried to convince ourselves how good squirrel stew tasted. Yep! We nailed that varmint’s hide onto what we finally declared to be “Squirrel Wall” (after much debate) and vowed there would be many more to join it. I put the tail in my cap, of course. Somehow, I think that as mighty woodland hunters went, we were just a tad short.

Now you know how we got there. What comes next is where it starts to get really interesting.

Remember the plane crash that killed everybody? That my brother, my mother, and my father all knew would happen? Well, I think I probably knew when I was inside my mom, ’cause this story is kind of like that only there’s no airplane in this tale—but there is a helicopter.

We’d been there about four or five days. One morning I was awakened out of a dead sleep by a very powerful jolt, and suddenly I knew beyond any shadow of doubt that “they” were on the way. I had no idea who “they” were, but I was absolutely certain they were coming for us and that whatever was going to happen was going to happen quick! ... It almost felt like some sort of emergency shock buzzer alarm button got pressed somewhere way down inside me—an extremely urgent feeling that left absolutely no room for doubt that whoever was coming for us was already headed our way at top speed that very moment! I remember jumping wide-eyed out of my bunk in a complete panic and immediately yelling really loud at my pals, “Get the heck up, you guys. They’re on their way for us … RIGHT NOW!”

They thought I’d gone starky—that I’d completely lost it. I started rushing wildly around the cabin, stuffing clothes in my bag, madly hopping around on one foot getting my boots, hat, and gloves together and trying to figure out how to erase all evidence we had been there all at once—and was still screaming like a mad man at the boys the whole time, “Wake the heck up … NOW!”

They thought I’d gone mad with cabin fever. At least that was the response I got. They told me more than once, “Cabin fever, Kev! It happens!” And then began telling tales of trappers gone insane, killing and eating their buddies and running madly off into blizzards naked, never to be seen again.

They just didn’t understand, and I had no way of explaining it to them. All I knew was that they were on their way. By the time I was ready with my hand on the doorknob my pals were still talking about breakfast!

The certainty I was feeling was getting stronger every moment, and I was becoming frantic because no matter how many times I told them “they” were coming—now—the two of them kept dawdling around and asking stupid questions I couldn’t answer. By the time they were finally ready I was screaming that I would leave them behind, “’cause I’m going, with or without you!”

I told them to shoulder their packs, opened the door just a crack, looked out, and then shut the door real quick. I remember very clearly looking at my two pals and shaking my head with a frustrated sigh. Then I threw the door wide open. Racing across the frozen lake straight toward us was a black and white helicopter. It only took a few seconds to make out the OPP markings. A few more and all of us could hear the megaphone blaring, “It’s no use running, boys! We have the rails blocked off at both ends. Stay where you are until we land!”

As I stepped through the door, I recall looking over to the woods and the rail line. I knew it wasn’t blocked, and that day I cussed myself out for being an idiot and not leaving. I knew that had I left when I should have, they would not have found me. Not until I wanted to be found. Now they knew we were in the area, and there was no place to run. It really didn’t matter anymore. Me being me, I would have run anyway, but I didn’t need to. Knowing that I could have was enough (for the time being). Of course, the OPP returned us to Winnipeg, first by helicopter to a city, then by plane to be met by our folks.

I don’t remember exactly what all happened, but I know I was gone again within a week.

Even though what I had felt was urgent and powerfully alarming, it felt almost normal. Natural, like it was a part of me and not from outside of me. I didn’t even question it. Not really. Once recognized, it seemed somehow as if it had always been there.

The others wondered. After the OPP brought us home, my friends asked how I knew the cops were coming. I had no more idea than they did, so I just told them I could feel my nose turning red when cops were around. After a while my friends started thinking I was kind of weird, and they didn’t want to hang around me too much. I think it made them uncomfortable.

I learned later that I could kind of control it. I experimented with it for a while and I was pretty accurate every time. It was easy. All I had to do was extend my spirit. Just push it out there and check things out—sometimes over quite some distances, sometimes over several hundred miles. Then again, some of it was just common sense and intuitiveness. But there was far more to it than just that. This knowing was not just limited to police. I could sense other things as well … in people.

I think after a bit I just got bored of it and stuffed it into the kit of survival skills I would come to accumulate over the years. But this … “thing” that had so suddenly popped into my life did not lie dormant. As time passed, it became far more refined and much more—useful.

Here is just one example of exactly how refined and how useful it could be. By this point, I’d had years of practice, though.

Before you read this, please try to understand what I’m trying to do here. I’m going to take only one example from each kind of weirdness in my life that best describes what it is I’m trying to comprehend. I’m trying to figure out what in the world these things are, where they come from, and what they’re there for. You know, the reason for them—why they happen. I have ideas, but that’s all I have.

Anyway, anyone I ever hitchhiked with knew about this little … oddity of mine. For quite a few years I travelled around Canada with a road partner I will call Bruce. He could keep the pace and was good for his word. A real hard one, he was. We had already hiked coast-to-coast trips several times and made more quick trips over the Rockies (Vancouver to Calgary, or vice versa) than I can keep track of. Nine or ten years we blew around the highways all over Canada together with not much in the way of downtime at all. On one of our later trips we picked up some baggage in Ottawa. Bruce went and found himself a girl, tough as he was.

The three of us were all hard-bitten highway trash (rather rare really), a peculiar breed, preferring the highway and the life and quietness it afforded to the crowded filth of the cities with their violence and insanity. Personally, at the latter part of my hiking I rarely ventured past the outskirts of any place unless it was pretty darn small.

We had been kicking it around for about four or five months when we decided to hole up at an abandoned cement factory on the outskirts of Regina. We thought we’d take a break, rest up, and get good and drunk for a while. Believe me, we made a pretty curious looking trio. All of us were road-hardened, well-seasoned hikers, and let’s just say we looked it.

Bruce and Norma made a rather unusual couple. He was a six-foot-six lanky Scotsman, with long curly reddish-brown hair, from which he was forever pulling various twigs and grasses, and Norma was a short stocky Native girl who prided herself on being stronger than most men. (She was, too!) She would just laugh in derision when guys would try to shoulder her green army duffel bag, full of our wet dirty laundry, she so proudly toted. Norma pulled her load and asked no quarter. A few years later, though, our lifestyle finally drove her almost out of her mind—literally. It made me very sad to see it. Actually, it drove two women half-crazy. There was nothing we could do about it. I … we … lived in a very strange world where strange things happening were simply a part of the whole. You had to accept things as they were. There were only a few who could handle the kind or amount of stress our life created.

Even though I had more experience on the road than the two of them put together, they were still top-notch highway folk. Far better than most I’d travelled with. The facts were, I couldn’t afford to travel with lightweights. The highway had been my path for many years by the time I ran into Bruce, let alone Norma, and I couldn’t afford to babysit. That could get real dangerous. Unless you could completely trust your partner to keep aware, it could get a guy dead.

It was hard all the years I travelled alone. You see, I loved people, but there just weren’t a lot of folks who could keep up or could even stand it for that matter. Believe me, I’ve had a number of folk try to travel with me only to watch them get hurt, tossed in jail, or just fade out on me. As I said, real road trash are kind of a dying breed. They’re almost extinct now. It was all in the temperament I guess. We were folk who knew how to sleep in a snowbank and not freeze to death. You got real creative on the road.

One of the most important attributes any highwayman can have is a real good sense of humour in real bad situations (among other things I won’t mention). Norma was always easy to be around—funny, smart, tough. She could see a bright spot on the dark side of the moon and would be quick to point it out when things got tough.

She had an infectious grin and, once you got to know her, a cheerful easy-going manner. I must say though, I’d seen her knock a couple of girls right unconscious (and a man, too). I guess it was the getting to know her part that was kinda hard.

Bruce was very intelligent, an actual card-carrying member of Mensa, extremely cunning, and well trained in some of the more brutal forms of combat. Yet despite that, he had a sense of humour that was priceless and had a way of cheering a guy up quick—a good man to have at your back. Trust was implicit. We had all paid our dues—road tax, if you will. Then there was me. That I’ll leave to your imagination.

The main thing was, we all got along really well. We understood each other, and we knew how to function as a unit very effectively. In almost any given circumstance, everyone knew their part and what was expected. We could read a play coming down, and each one of us knew exactly what to do and had respect for the special gifts and abilities of the others. We could also laugh together, and we did—often.

The factory was one of our regular stops. Sheltered from wind and rain, unexposed to the public, yet still close enough to all amenities (most importantly the beer store), it was an oasis in the middle of a prairie desert. We were also well known and liked by the locals. A lot of them looked on our arrival as an annual event and would actually worry if we were late. They would often bring “beer, blankets, and bongs” in the evening and then sit around and listen to Bruce and me play guitar and tell tales of our latest crazy adventures across the country.

At any rate, we had been there two or three days when it happened. I had awoken before the others and as was my custom had begun casting about, sniffing the wind, and sensing … other things as well.

Norma woke up, and when she saw me, she knew exactly what I was doing. Bruce always had a hard time with it (I think it scared him), but it seems for some reason Natives have a much easier time handling … what I was doing. “What’s out there, Kev?” she inquired. Bruce began to wake up.

I was about to say “Nothing,” as I was usually only concerned with anything in the immediate area that could be a real and direct threat, but on impulse I focused and pushed a little harder. It was like a combination of seeing and knowing all at the same time. These are the words I said that morning.

“In about fifteen—no … in about twenty minutes there will be three cop cars—no … four cop cars are going to roll up on us. They’re looking for someone, but it’s none of us. They are going to give us a real hard time. They will make us scatter our clothes and bags out onto the concrete—I mean spread them right out, but they’ll find nothing they are looking for. One of the cops is going to have his gun drawn. It will be pointing at the ground. After they ask us a whole bunch of questions, they’ll leave us alone and go their way. Everything will be fine. The trouble is coming from over there.” I then indicated a group of houses across the field from us. I repeated what I said about the gun and the clothes at least two or three times.

Norma got up immediately and started picking up all the empty beer cans and organizing the cases. (We had a heck of a lot of cases.) Bruce was listening, but he just looked at me sideways and said nothing, shaking his head a bit.

When he saw what Norma was doing he asked her what she was up to. Replying over her shoulder she said quite confidently, “You heard what he said!” and kept right on working. Like I said, Natives are just better with this kind of thing than most white people. Unfortunately, this blessing can also be a curse for them. Shamanism is tricky business.

Between us we got the camp organized. I advised both of them to keep any weapons in plain sight and to stash all contraband. I also warned them to telegraph any moves and be slow and deliberate if they had to move at all. I knew this was going to happen and that there would be a sidearm somewhere in the picture. When we were done, we all cracked a beer, sat on our backpacks, and basically started enjoying the morning.

All of us had plenty of contact with highway RCMP in the past. They were generally a good bunch—cops doing their jobs. Most of the ones we dealt with knew all of us, either personally or via reputation. We stayed out of trouble. They knew what we were and never really gave us a hard time at all. We gave respect and expected the same.

Sure enough, exactly what I said unfolded right in front of our eyes. Just shy of 20 minutes later three cruisers rolled up and stopped about 25 feet away. The doors opened, but no one got out. They seem to be waiting for something. Then a fourth cruiser pulled up and parked a little off to the side and farther away. That’s when the other three officers walked over and shook us down.

And yes, we had to scatter our clothes out all over the concrete, and they proceeded to search our stuff, and us, right down to our shorts. They actually stuck me in a poncho, raincoat, a pair of shades, and a bandanna (I guess they were trying to make me look suspicious) and told me to stand apart from the others. Then while I was standing there all dolled up, still yet another cruiser rolled up with an elderly woman in the back. She gave me a good look and indicated a negative, and the car pulled away. That’s when I saw the gun. Through the crack of the open door of the cruiser that had parked at a distance I could see that the officer behind it was holding his gun with both hands, pointing it at the ground.

As the cops were pretty much finished with us I walked slowly over to the older cop and smiling asked, “What were you going to do with that?” He never took his eyes off my partners but smiled very nervously in return and said, “I’m too old to take chances!” I agreed. Then I asked, “What’s all this about anyway?”

“A lady over there,” indicating the buildings I had pointed to earlier, “had her place broken into, and she saw who did it.”

After a bit of radio work the cops went their way, and Norma and I started talking about what happened. That’s when I saw Bruce looking at me real quiet like as he drank his beer. I don’t think he quite trusted me after that. Like I said, it scared him a little.

That was all right. I’d gotten used to folks looking at me strange over the years. People had been looking at me funny since the first time it happened, so I had a lot of years of practice dealing with it. I was often looked at as a bit odd. “Whacked,” I call it. I can tell you whole bunches of stories just like this one. Some of them a whole lot stranger, but the content is, well … unhelpful.

And what would be the point? I could tell you how I knew from over three hundred miles away, after not speaking with him for a couple of years, that this same Bruce was making a move from BC to Toronto, raced all the way across country to intercept him, and missed him by less than 10 minutes. People witnessed that. But that’s not the point.

The point is—I’m the one who has to live with this crap! It’s all part of this big mess of things I’m trying to figure out—that I want to make sense out of. The hard part about stuff like this is trying to find somebody who’s not a witch or a warlock to talk with about it. I have found very few mature Christians who really understand how this stuff works. I myself am just beginning to understand the difference between the godly use of spiritual gifts and witchcraft. I’m pretty sure it has to do with using the gift under the anointing and direction of the Holy Spirit for the building up of the body of Christ and the furtherance of the gospel (instead of accomplishing my own agendas and gaining power and influence). I may not be able to explain it right, but I’ll tell you one thing—I’m a heck of a lot more careful with it after tangling with a few covens! (I’ll get to that as well.)

And I was a Christian through 98 percent of what I’m about to tell you. Do you have any idea what that does to a guy’s head? I had already been trying to get sober for years by then. Every time I’d give up, God would do something crazy to get my attention. He never let me go. I was his child. But I’ll let God speak for himself on that score. He sure spoke to me enough about it.

Like almost all the stuff that’s happened, every single time it came looking for me. This “thing inside me” happened on its own accord without any help from me, and I’ll tell you for sure, I certainly didn’t go looking for it. I had no idea anything like it existed. It was something already there. God put it in me. And how do you tell God to get lost or start complaining about it? I’ve noticed he’s a tad deaf at times. After much prayer, he has finally spoken clearly to me about this little oddity of mine, and for now I am to leave it alone.