Issue 23

Casey Plett

I was out front at the bar after closing time with a bunch of other weirdos. This short guy with curly hair and I started talking. You want to get a king can? His name was Owen. Owen was from Île-des-Chênes. I’m not from here, he kept saying, I grew up in a small town. He was pretty, and he was nice without being attentive, and I liked that about him. This was years ago.

We were drinking our last one in the parking lot when Owen’s friends drove by. We’re going to see the meteor shower! Out by the floodway, wanna come?

In 1950, the Red River catastrophically overflowed. It destroyed four of the city’s bridges, blanketed the valley to the south. They built the floodway in the years after: a long, giant drainage culvert dug into the side of the prairie. It sends the river away from the city when it floods. They called it Duffy’s Ditch after Duff Roblin, the premier, and my dad always said they voted him out ASAP because of how much money it cost. My dad loved to say that, but I looked it up and it wasn’t true. The guy was re-elected twice.

To answer Owen’s friends, I did want to go to the floodway, yes. I can get my dad’s car, I’ve got keys, I said to Owen, we can follow them. I went to pick it up and drove back and got Owen and added Amy, a quiet punk with a black hoodie and no makeup and a backpack. We stopped at Mac’s for smokes and I pissed in the alley. This was back in the days I lived on Spence. I didn’t have a vagina then.

Out by the floodway, we lay on blankets and someone produced beers. We tried to watch the meteor shower, but mostly it was blank—occasional traces of falling dots you strained to see, the opposite of a spectacle, the city lights still too bright out here.

But the guys were clowning around, and the sky was still beautiful, and I drank my beer lying on the blanket looking up. ‘Josh on his way?’ ‘He’s twelve miles past Beausejour.’ ‘Twelve Miles Past Beausejour is the name of my new Nickelback cover band.’ And I said nothing, and it was so nice to just be and not need or be needed.

Then Owen’s friends said they were going further out, to really see the shower. We were totally in. We got back in the car. They drove west for a while and then turned south onto the number seventy-five highway.

We drove for a while. Then another while. The city was long behind us. Owen’s phone was dead and we couldn’t call them.

I started to get worried.

Amy said, Does anyone mind if I open a beer? We didn’t. But Owen’s friends kept fucking driving! All the way to fucking Morris! The only stop between the city and the border, the only place for miles in the country with a gas station open at night.

They stopped at that gas station and we got out. We said, What the fuck? But they were just as surprised. You drove all this way? Why didn’t you turn around?! We were just out of gas. It struck me, later, how there’s a divide in the expectation of whether someone will be concerned for you, or not, and how sometimes that divide falls down gendered lines (and sometimes not).

It was past four AM and we were zonked. We turned around to drive home. And then, as dawn filtered into the sky, Owen’s friends pulled over and jumped out of the car.

There’s a big tree off the seventy-five at that point just north of Morris. The boys ran across the road toward it, through the field, gradually lit by the slow prairie light. Owen and I sat on the hood of the car with a blanket wrapped around us and watched his friends climb in the sunrise. They looked beautiful.

Did we kiss then? You know, I don’t remember. I only remember how his body felt against mine under the blanket, his friends like ants on the horizon, bathed in yellow and orange.

Back in the city, we dropped Amy off, then went to Owen’s place in South Osborne. Inside were empty beer bottles and a roommate freshly home from work, a guy with a mean look to him, that look some white boys have that says they’re fucking their lives up now and maybe they’ll be doing the same in two decades and maybe they’ll own a house with a pool and shithead kids.

By then it was full daylight. Owen led me into his room: A single mattress and scattered piles of crap on hard wall-to-wall carpet. We lay on the mattress and made out. I told him I was trans, but it seemed like he’d figured that out. He asked some stupid questions, and then he stopped. I started jerking him off, said I wanted him to fuck me. That’s when he said he had a girlfriend.

I can take a hint, you know? I got up and walked out the door so I could give back the car and sleep a few hours before my shift. I never saw Owen again. I asked after him, once, a month later, because one evening I woke up to a sunset and I remembered when the sun had risen over the tree with his body next to mine under the blanket, and a softness in my heart awakened and said, What if you hadn’t run away? That night I went to the beer vendor and I asked after Owen, as one of his friends from that night worked there. The friend was the guy who said we should leave the floodway.

It heartened the friend, that I’d asked after Owen. He gave me his number, said you should get in touch with him. The friend looked hopeful as he said it. I wonder if I could’ve communicated to him. How as soon as I took the number down I knew, I knew I would be too chickenshit, too courageless to crack the door on even the chance of a good outcome. I didn’t have the courage. It’s been ten years, and I lost the number, but I still remember the feeling of his body, and I’m trying, now, to have the courage.