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Real money in that. What would we call it, eh? Cape Breton Gold? Canso Red? He laughed. He was a heavy guy with a blond neatly groomed beard and a darker ponytail, hauling drums of herbicide to some Swedish pulp company over in Port Hawkesbury, and Innis envied him, on the move, heading out every day. If guys like him wanted weed, Innis could, maybe by September, with some luck and good weather, provide it. And no middleman.
    But without money, without a car, you were helpless, no more than a kid anyway. When the INS officer told him, Son, you are barred for life and that means what it says, it knocked him back, he felt like a bum. He couldn’t live in the country he’d grown up in, couldn’t even do time there anymore, they did not want him in the United States, period. He had told his mother, for Christ’s sake, hard criminals don’t even get thrown out of here, Ma, people a hundred times worse than me walk the streets free every day, killers, rapists, the worst kind of scum. They do time, they get to go back home when it’s over. But his mother said, You
are
a criminal, Innis, that’s what they call you when you keep stealing automobiles, andthey are sending you home, that’s where you were born, down east. You can live with Uncle Starr until you get on your feet. His feet? What about the rest of him?
    He had thought, Cape Breton, it’s just a name I’m going to, he heard it in his first memories, fluttering through his mother and dad’s conversation, always with a peculiar and specific warmth whether their tone was anger or nostalgia, he’d heard it on the telephone as they talked with friends, it was a place where the people in his parents’ kitchen came from because they had so many stories about it, Cape Bretoners they laughed over or admired or recalled with affection, the room full of cigarette smoke, bottles of beer or rum or Canadian whisky on the table, names tossed back and forth, you remember Johnny MacPhail, Johnny Nookie we called him? Lord, yes, he put out the bushline on the ice until he was too old to stand. And old Archie Bain, he told my dad, Listen, if you want to farm good you got to get the sheepses. But the names just drifted past, Innis never dreamed he’d be going there, “down home” belonged to his parents, to their time and their past, not to his, and Starr was just another name he had heard. A road to Cape Breton, that’s how he’d thought of it as a kid, there was a road that went there and back to Boston, and all these people who gathered in the kitchen and called on the phone had travelled it one time or another, some just yesterday, last night, fresh with news and stories, and others a long time ago, but they had stories too and memories and people they loved to talk about, and they all seemed to want to go back over that road, sometime, even the ones who never would. Innis had thought it an awful long road to where they all had come from and where they all were going, and even the oneswho said they were glad they’d left sounded like they couldn’t forget this road either, and if Innis could get on it, if somebody would put him in a car and take him there, he would understand what they were all talking about and he wouldn’t be outside their passions and joys. But as he got older, it was not a road Innis wanted to take, he wasn’t listening in the kitchen anymore, it wasn’t his road, it was theirs.
    Innis took another hit and pinched the roach into his pocket. That day he had run from this place, a couple weeks after he arrived, he’d turned back just beyond New Glasgow when he realized how broke and how dumb he was, no idea where he was headed except away from North St. Aubin, and it had taken him most of the day to get off Cape Breton Island, Canada already feeling like just one great westward space, blank, cold. By dark he was back on the Island, not far beyond the Canso Causeway. Two short rides and his thumb was out again, hitching to the Ferry Road, to Starr