The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky

rubbing together with each step, and his legs already felt damp and sweaty inside his jeans.
    The tires had lit by then, and each one exploded with a muffled thump. When the police came and ran the burned, ridged numbers of the licence plate through their computer, it told them that the registered owner was Ray Hennessey, General Delivery, Gaspereaux, Nova Scotia. And Ray was far away already, walking. As he walked, he looked at the long runs of escaped foxglove and lupin running down below the shoulder of the road, and he wondered how long it had been since he had actually smelled the full, sweet scent that blew off the flowers.
    It had all started with a fight with Jenine – everything started with a fight now. Or ended with one. And it was almost impossible to reconcile this Jenine with that other Jenine, the Jenine who had been so quiet, sitting with a small knot of her friends in the club at Evangeline Beach.
    Then, the club had been a regular summer hangout, and teenagers had driven from Kentville and New Minas, from Windsor and Hantsport and Wolfville, to dances in the close, muggy airless club – thick with the smell of chewing gum and beer and sweaty bodies – the only break from the heat coming when the piled-cloud thunderstorms rolled upthe length of the valley from Digby and brought a short few hours of respite. Then, the curtains beside the open windows would breathe in and out with the short, sharp breaths of cool, post-rain air.
    Now, what had been the long, open dance floor was crowded with pinball machines and video games, and there was a tired shop counter where you could buy charcoal and potato chips, hotdog buns and almost-cold soft drinks. The building sagged, broken-backed at some point along its sills, settling into the contour of the ground. A desultory and thinly-attended mini-golf course sat by the back door, eighteen holes dressed in frayed green outdoor carpet. Battered putters lay forgotten under a dusty grey layer, a thin skin of oxidation from the salt air. Around the back, a small forest of camper-trailers had grown up, permanent residents who parked their campers high on cinder blocks, planted gardens and built brick barbecues. They came out every weekend to shout greetings to the same familiar neighbours. Not a journey, just a simple change of backdrop for actors in the same play.
    The high brown tides of Minas Basin were chewing away at the promontory where the club sat, and each year, the owners had truckloads of boulders and the remains of road work dumped there to hold back the sea – flat black oozing plates of asphalt, squares of concrete sidewalks, busted-up pieces of curbs and gutters. But the winter storms chewed all of that away, sucking the pavement slabs out into the mud and scattering them deep in the bay.
    There had been, for years, a long point of land there, stretching above the ruler-flat beach. On hot nights, when ice melted in your glass faster than you could drink, you could stand under a string of coloured lights at the end of the point and look out over the dark bay – wherever the tide was, whether you were looking over bare mud flats and shingle beach or over the flat, waveless surface of the bay, it gave the same inky black impression: it was a necessary opposite, the negative to the flat silver of the day. The red-brown sandstone was eaten away in layers on the outcrop, each thin sliver, each ragged step in the stone a collection of hardened centuries melting away.
    When the moon rose full over the long ridge of Blomidon to the south, you could lean on the railing and watch the swifts and swallows scoop up swamp mosquitoes and midges just as the last of the light failed.
    He had met Jenine out there. She had been standing near the rail, waving a hand uselessly at the cloud of insects. The swallows wheeled in, dark shapes with their wings folded flat against their bodies like darts, gathering flies from just above their heads.
    And