“Do you wanna go up to Jasper this weekend?” asks Arlan. “If we go to the Riv one more time I swear I’m gonna blow my brains out.” The Riv is our favourite bar as it’s closest to our high school and they don’t bother checking for I.D. It’s also a horrible, foul-smelling dive but who cares? Trouble is, we’ve been going there every weekend non-stop since classes started two months ago.

“You driving?” I ask. “My brother’s got the ‘blue moon’ this weekend.” We call our family car the blue moon because of all the crater-like dents from when we learned to drive on it.

“Okay… but we split the gas.” Goes without saying, really. Pretty much everyone’s broke in our crowd.

Jasper is a small resort town in the Rocky Mountains and in decent weather it’s about a four-hour drive. The road is flat as a pancake and boringly straight until near the Jasper National Park gates, then winds a bit in the last hour as it follows the Athabasca River through the Yellowhead Pass. But the most memorable part of the drive, unfortunately, is the god-awful stench of the pulp mill in Hinton just outside the Park boundary. If you can hold your breath long enough it’s worth it though, as Jasper sports some world-class mountain scenery. We go there, however, for other recreational pursuits.

“Phew… did you cut one, man? What d’ya have for breakfast, scrambled skunk?” Arlan always makes some crack when we go through Hinton. It’s like a tradition. And I always laugh, no matter how stupid it is.

“Can’t you get the goddam heater to work in this thing?” I ask, ignoring him.

“Nope, but we can stop at the next gas station and snuggle for a while if you’d like,” he replies.

“Sounds good to me,” I say, and slug him on the shoulder, hard.

“Hey, watch it! I’m driving!”

The sun

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Preston Randall
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 01.12.2011
ISBN: 978-3-7309-1542-4

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