The Miracles of Ordinary Men by Amanda Leduc

expect too much. You need to learn.” He smiles. “But that’s why you’re here, Delilah. This is what I will teach you.” And that’s when he hits her. He smacks her mouth with the back of his hand and her head snaps back. The world is blurred. He pushes her against the wall and her head cracks against the door. She focuses long enough to see Israel above her like some ancient god, lightning pulsing in his fist. He hits her again and pain blossoms along her cheekbone. She tastes blood at the corner of her mouth, hard and metallic, like fear.

Eight
    He drove.
    Chickenhead had glared at him for the first five minutes, then curled up on the passenger seat and ignored him. The sun rose slowly as he made his way across the bridge. He drove past his mother’s cul-de-sac and thought about stopping to check on the plants, then decided against it
and wound the window down instead. The air smelled of spruce and rain and earth. He drove, and Joni Mitchell sang of strangers and trembling bones.
    The summer he turned twenty, he’d loaded the old Jeep with books and had driven across the country, just because. The cassettes thrown over the passenger seat soon outnumbered the books. He listened to The Eagles. He beat the steering wheel in time to Jethro Tull. He bought a second-hand guitar at a dilapidated music store in Kelowna and knew “House of the Rising Sun” before he was through the Rockies. By the time he got to Winnipeg he was sick of it, and stashed the guitar in the back.
    He’d forgotten — maybe he’d never known — how big the country was; how seamless and yet different the landscape, sliding from mountains to flat and back again as he climbed the rocky Ontario roads. Further east, in Trois-Pistoles (a history stemming from three coins lost in the river — he stopped because he liked the name), a grizzled old boutique
owner pushed
Hejira
into his hands.
    â€œThe road,” he said. His name was Remy. He had a clubfoot and a burn scar that stretched all the way down the left side of his face. “The road,
oui
.”
He wouldn’t let Sam speak French, though his English was passable at best.
    â€œYou listen,” he said. “
Écoutez —
you like.”
    He accepted the tape — the old man was a keen disciple, because he gave it away for free — and listened to two songs, then took it out and went back to Jethro Tull.
    But he didn’t throw it away, and when he got back to Vancouver he kept it because it reminded him of Remy. Gradually, it began to remind him of the entire trip — mountains and lakes and hot sun over the prairies.
Hejira
hadn’t been meant for the prairies, of course — Joni had written it with the road from Maine to LA in mind — but it worked. Snow and pinewood trees and Benny Goodman — he’d had sunshine and cedar and seventies psychedelia, yet somehow it was all the same.
    Now here he was, again, listening to Joni sing as he wound the car down to the water.
    â€œAm I missing something?” he said. To the air, to Chickenhead. The only answer came from Joni. Wax and rolling tears — couldn’t help him any.
    Chickenhead spared him a glance and then went back to her catnip, holding it soft between her paws and then snapping it between small white teeth. Lately she’d taken to looking at him with a renewed glint of interest, the same look she reserved for mice and other objects of play. Not surprising, really — he was, after all, turning into a giant bird.
    Scars
,
the doctor had said. Traumatic scars, extensive stitching. What did that mean? He couldn’t begin to guess.
    â€”
    On the ferry, he sat outside on the floor, in an alcove made by a sleek silver lifeboat bin and a blank stretch of wall. He willed himself smaller, invisible. It had started to rain; hardly anyone came outside and when they did, they walked past him or away in the opposite direction, avoiding