Keeping Things Whole

by Darryl Whetter

  Most criminals are greedy bullies. Greedy bullies or, just as bad, greedy little followers who try to impress someone, maybe even themselves, by being more bullying. They rob, abuse, and exploit their families before they set to work on strangers. Once they’ve robbed and hit their way out of one family, they usually go looking for another.

  In Canada, everyone in my trade, everyone, is far more worried about gangs than cops. The ’Namese in Vansterdam. Jamaicans in Toronto. Bikers anywhere outside a city and anywhere east of Toronto. And we’re all bankrolling them. Weed should be the easiest drug to keep out of gang hands: it’s grown not manufactured, can be grown in every province, and seeds can be obtained through the mail and/or transferred from one crop to the next. One advantage of weed being illegal is that the plant has been spared any of the suicide genes Big Agri is trying to build into every crop. Sixteen-year-olds can and do grow totally serviceable pot, but Canadian smokers are still Canadian. The majority don’t grow their own food or smoke. As a grower grows, his ears are always cocked for the sound of an approaching Harley.

  At the casino I swam in fast currents of worry. Working with crews, all that was necessary to send hurt my way was for someone to want a little extra money and not mind selling me out to get it. Businesses, governments, schools, parents, criminals—we’re all fighting short-term accounting. If a friend of a friend of a loose-lipped employee knew a friend who knew a biker, blabbing about my operation could earn the blabber a shot of cash. When two bikers made a point of speaking to me one night at the casino, I had to take it as more than coincidence.

  They might have been there looking for their own chisel on the casino, though if so they shouldn’t have arrived dressed as bikers, all whiskers, gut, and leather. They could even have been another pair of money-throwing gamblers. That is, if they hadn’t made such a point of talking to me. Repeatedly. And after they roared.

  Given this blog and a pile I started with a trebuchet, one of my guilty pleasures is obviously gear. From trebuchets to this website, the tech snares me. Hummers and tanks, no. An ingenious tool, yes. I’d never handwrite an 80,000-word apology/hello. But really, a Harley? A Harley Davidson is designed to be noisy, to roar on demand. A $15,000 fart joke. Or a purchased growl.

  Normally at the casino we didn’t see too many bikers. Given the short lifespan of “gaming” workers mowed down by second-hand cancer, I doubt there’s one alive who remembers casinos before electronic surveillance. Even bikers can recognize that they’d be spotted if they so much as walked along the casino sidewalk in full regalia. Of course they could always try disguises. Shave. Sport a tweed sheep-fucking cap, not a bandana. Prefer a Hawaiian shirt to a leather vest. But then they’d be reduced to size alone for intimidation. Cops, soldiers, bikers—they all want their uniforms and their teams. Boys with boy packs. Peters fucking Pan.

  The night I saw a hulking pair of bikers roll around the garishly lit casino drive for a second time, I could suddenly feel my thighbones, knew how far my elbows were from my ribs and felt the outline of my cell in my back pocket.

  The casino’s circular driveway was designed as if gamblers were bees and we needed to be the brightest flower on the glowing Windsor waterfront. Crossbreed Walt Disney with Albert Speer (Hitler’s “architect of light”), give the spawn truckloads of rainbow-coloured lights, get him drunk on local rye, and you might recreate our multicoloured cave entrance. Despite the bubbling and chugging of the fountains and the trickle of horrible music, the entrance was more flower for the eye than mating call for the ear. When the bikers roared up the first time, my crew and I (as well as everyone else who wasn’t deaf) definitely noticed. On their second pass, when they stopped to sit and idle behind the unloading Lexuses, I could tell myself and anyone else who asked I was doing my legitimate job as I radioed security before striding over to meet them.

  “Evening gentleman. None of us is licensed to park a bike, so if you just head down the street to—”

  “You don’t talk very loud,” said Thug One.

  “Not a lot of force in the voice,” added his partner.

  Each of them was at least 275 pounds and six-foot-something. A lot of fat, sure, but no doubt plenty of experience with pain.

  “You want to talk—” I pointed at the bike’s keys and mimed turning them off. “You want to game,” I nodded my head down the road, “head to one of our lots. I’m asking you to move. The cops won’t be so polite.”

  For the next fifteen seconds, each of them pretended their eyes were actually emitting the mechanical roar. “You won’t phone the police.” No. 1 finally said before he then his partner cracked the air and roared off.

  As soon as they were out of sight I was dialling Kate and rushing back inside. Their departing bikes filled one ear and her ringing phone the other. C’mon. C’mon. Shit, voicemail. “Listen carefully. Lock the doors then turn on the balcony lights. Keep a phone in your hand. Do this now. No debates.” I scrawled a note about my absence then tried her again as I ran to my bike.

  The worried sound of her voice scraped me. I interrupted her to say, “Lock the front door. Move now.”

  “Ant, what is—”

  “Get it locked, NOW.”

  “Slow down. For a start, I’ve been locking a door behind me since residence. Secondly—”

  “And the lights. Get the outside lights on but then move away from the windows.”

  Uncharacteristically, she paused. At least I could hear her moving around the apartment.

  “You wouldn’t scare me without a reason. What am I looking for?”

  “Probably nothing.”

  She waited.

  “But maybe two bikers. Big ones. I’m on my way now.”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “Don’t hesitate for a second to phone the police.”

  I got there ridiculously quickly, which mattered and didn’t. The casino uniform I tried not to wear much in front of her looked even worse pasted to my back with sweat. Slipping across the lawn, tiptoeing up the stairs, ears pricked, eyes roaming—I’d never felt more connected to the pregnancy than when I thought she was in danger. I know, I know: asshole as charged, and all unnecessarily. There was never any sign again of those bikers, not at home or the casino. Pregnancy can rewire even coincidence. It’s like a colour filter changing everything you see.

  I unlocked our door as quietly as possible to the sight of Kate holding my baseball bat to her shoulder. Each of us said all we needed to say with a look. You have no right to do this to me. Agreed.

  After two largely silent hours of fewer and fewer glances out the window I wound up uttering yet another cliché I shouldn’t have. “I panicked over nothing, nothing but coincidence. Better safe than sorry.”

  “This is hardly safe, and we’re already sorry.”

  Her back was a wall I slept against.

  35. Mombeth

  The Greek myths had their meddling gods. We have our cellphones and answering machines. As another crucial September week ticked past with the batter still in the oven, I came home in relationship limbo to two more significant phone messages.

  First, from Glore.

  Hey, kids, great news. With my new backer I got the Capitol Theatre! Kate, don’t you think Antony should wear a suit for a change instead of that valet uniform? Let’s celebrate. Love vous, Mom.

  The second message plucked the hairs on the back of my neck.

  Hey, Kate, it’s Melissa returning your call. I can meet you Thursday or Friday.

  Was it good or bad that my pregnant lover had called up her sex worker acquaintance? Melissa’s team definitely knew birth control. And its alternatives. Then again, why would Kate have given Melissa our number, not her cell? The plot thickened along with the zygote.

  Another thing about actors: they don’t get mad; they get even. In public. Theatre of war isn’t an accidental phrase. All wars require
planning and drama. With my secret backing, Gloria had chosen to direct Macbeth that fall long before Kate and I had stepped so far into our own river of blood. Given her months of preparation, Gloria couldn’t have set out to include our homegrown content, but she was also never one to miss a creative opportunity on the fly.

  With her Medea, I’d been utterly impressed. And proud. Best of all was the layered surprise of admitting there was more to her than I knew, and that the unknown bits were admirable. Wicked eyes brighter than diamonds, shoulders and thighs flared with strength. With her child-killing Medea, I’d thought about her and my street dealing. With her Macbeth, the murderous couple, she demanded I think about Kate and me. She turned Macbeth into Mombeth.

  Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. Where Hamlet ponders, Macbeth does. The thinker and the doer, reason and instinct, opportunity found or made. Here again Billy Shakes coaxed history into the familiar tragic arc of a self-propelled rise and a self-generated fall. This time, though, he did it with a couple. Not just the human heart in conflict with itself, but the human heart in conflict with itself and another heart it loves. Conflict, paired.

  By the time Gloria got the Capitol Theatre, we were secretly in the family way. (Excuse the redundancy: families aren’t families without secrets.) As Mom moved from design sketches and working concepts to casting and the exploratory first read-through, Kate and I ineluctably moved day by day to parenthood. Gloria used money she didn’t know was mine to sign a theatre-rental contract during Kate’s sixth week. The show would go up at Thanksgiving, the end of our eleventh week. I prayed for peace in the eleventh hour and was prepared to do plenty to give thanks.

  The first month of a pregnancy usually flies below the radar. Best to go for the A-vacuum ASAP. How could you miss what you barely knew you had? The count starts with the last period, not the moment when the white agent provocateur swims on through, so you’ve already lost a couple of weeks from the get-go. Behind the clock. Under the gun.

  You’d think that two atheists with bounders for fathers would be immune to any saccharine delusions about families and Thanksgiving, but tell that to hope and/or hormones. I gambled that the October long weekend would be good for my cause, that a well-fed and traditionally wine-soaked weekend at the one-quarter mark of Kate’s final year of law school might remind her how close she was to the time limit on this decision. I could also hope that spending time with her mother and mine, each with their holiday cocktails of judgement, misperception, and arrogance, their hors d’oeuvres of manipulation and their entrées of disapproval, would send Kate running for her tallest boots and a cocktail shaker, not mat wear. If you’re wondering how I could hold on so long thinking that on Day 48 she’d tell me of an appointment she wasn’t willing to make on Day 47, remember that she wasn’t just young and pregnant. She was young, pregnant, and surrounded by women her age who were all about to become lawyers.

  At the end of August, the calendar had been my enemy. Kate was still isolated, cut off from others and, crucially, out of competition. Anyone on a second university degree has learned to play the whole season, not just the single game or tournament. In summer, Kate might have thought of her, or Cletus, or us. In the fall, she’d have other women to think about, other, striving women.

  Generally she hated that law school was yet another girl aquarium, the bright fish illuminated for all to see. But the future contract makers were already involved in a dozen contracts, some of them hard. Each of them knew they could still get great jobs with a B+ average, whereas only a monastic amount of studying would earn them A’s. Three years of bags under the eyes and no friends to earn a GPA some firms would find frankly off-putting or three years of some studying, but also movies, books, dinner parties, and weekends away? For the B+ crowd (i.e., anyone who wasn’t hoping to work in The Hague), law school was yet another fashion show. The aspiring legal ladies still wanted to be bar girls on Friday nights but now suddenly office tramps as well. The crisp shirts. Oh, the high boots and short skirts. A new tote bag each term.

  While the majority of law school may have been another fashion show, Kate had also pointed out its diehard cell, women with chewed fingernails who could give you the daily body count in Iraq. The men with dark stubble, slim cellphones, and zero body fat who had compendious knowledge of Israel and the UN. Blond experts on Kosovo wore combat boots to mandatory classes in real-estate law and tried not to go insane.

  I don’t hide for a second my hope that Kate’s competitiveness or envy or fear of rumour at school would tip the abortion scales she wouldn’t tip just thinking about us. Was this hope healthy? Mature? Admirable? No. No. No. Whatever got the job done.

  Turn over the rock of many social problems and, yes, you’ll find the footprints of a departing father. Bullying. Arson. Illiteracy. All those pleas for attention even if it’s negative, all those fuck-yous to the self and the world. Too true, but my preference was to be a non-father, not an absentee father. Also, I did have a Plan B. Nature, gorgeous women, and the insurance industry abhor a vacuum. If I didn’t stick around to pay bills, take out the garbage, and run errands, someone else surely would.

  Throughout Mom’s rehearsal period, Kate and I continued to have our fights, thaws, and freezes, while my shill at Cronus Holdings doled the cash out to Glore. Twice I agreed with her gamble to run Shakespeare and a tragedy during Thanksgiving weekend. I encouraged her both as her son and, secretly, as her backer. Thanksgiving, a long weekend in which southern Ontarians no longer need to flee the climate and polluted landscape in which they make their money. And of course families get together on holidays. What’s a family without blood, betrayal, and tragedy?

  Originally we planned to see the show twice, on opening and closing nights. Two different dresses and suits, a slightly different show. But that was before we saw what Mom did with and to Macbeth. She started with children then got worse.

  Act I, Sc. i. Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES.

  In Gloria’s case, that was enter three girls. We’re talking nine or ten years old. All Asian, dressed in rags. Black hair matted and clumped. They wiped runny noses on torn sleeves. Flashes of lightning revealed sores on their lips, dirt-smeared cheeks, and filthy hands. Push a broom down a Calcutta alley and you’d collect these girls. This was the face of global poverty, each of them starving, illiterate, and capable of fleecing your pockets in a second. When Macbeth first saw the witches, this medieval Scottish nobleman’s opening question could have been asked by any North American tourist to New Delhi. Macbeth carries a sword, we carry a fanny pack, but each of us asks: “What are these / so wither’d and so wild in their attire, / That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth / And yet are on’t?” Here were the global poor, of my species yet not, deserving my guilt yet too alien to matter.

  When Macbeth continued, “Live you? or are you aught / That man may question?” I heard the first private knife sharpening in the rented theatre. Indisputably, there had been a little emphasis on man. “Live you? or are you aught / That man may question?” Kate and I kept looking at the stage, not each other. At Macbeth’s line, “You should be women—” the little witches drew the backs of their grimy hands to their dirty cheeks. With their elbows pointing high above their shoulders and the backs of their wrists pressed to their blackened cheeks, they wiggled their fingers in front of their mouths to suggest the “beards” Macbeth puzzles over: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.” Ten minutes into the play and Mom was talking crotch. You should be women and elbows raised in the air like knees in metal stirrups. Fingers as beards at a hairy mouth. And young, Asian girls. Give Gloria some production money and look what she does.

  Part of me was still able to admire the risks she was taking. No male director on the continent could do what she’d just done with child actors. But that beard joke was like a road sign pointing exactly my way. Even worse, I felt like a mom in thinkin
g so. Aside from Gloria, dozens of people worked in her cast, crew, and production team to bring a four-hundred-year-old play to life for up to five-hundred spectators across a six-night run, and I thought it was all about me. But how not to? A man on the illegal make who’s murderously afraid of children.

  You may not want to hear this (but you have thought about it). Sitting in front of this trio of girls (Asian girls: Web porn and gendered abortion) raising their arms/legs to wriggle pubic hair in front of them—well, all this beside my Kate. Those girls on stage inverting age with their raised legs, that was life, not the polite lies we slop around it. Go to a wedding and nothing about the manicured event suggests that two crotches are being joined. No rented chair, centrepiece, rustle of silk, nor (toxic) salmon fillet acknowledges that first and foremost this is a union of genitals. Surely the relevant question is, Do you take his sex and you hers? How can you keep things whole in a rented tux and a dress that never gets worn again?

  In a darkened theatre, Mom’s darkened theatre, I saw in a flash what I was about to lose with Kate, that patch of private grass, lawn of refuge, picnic, and play. No one else had so captivated me, challenged me, or vexed me, and nowhere was Kate more half-Chinese than between the knees. Every day we saw race in the knitting, my tight curls to her wiry hair. All of this and more was coming at me in the first ten minutes of Mombeth.

  I was watching witches and thinking of mothers. Both are terrifying in isolation and in packs. Gloria pulling puppet strings in front of me and Kate reorbiting beside me, all with Shakespeare’s taunting lines. “Live you? or are you aught / That man may question?” Well, there was every thought I had about what was quickening inside Kate.