Dancing on a Razor. Kevin John White

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