Abigal Skinner was not particularly pretty; indeed, calling her plain was something of a kindness. Her eyes were too small, and placed close together on her face; between them was a crooked nose. Abigal had thick lips and an overbite, the overbite causing her weak chin to be displayed prominently. Abigal’s best feature was her hair, which was colored a dull brown but kept long, tumbling down to her waist if she allowed it, which she did on Thursdays, bathing days, alone.
Abigal stepped out of her frock. Mrs. Skinner was slightly obese, her breasts pendulous, her belly round and pushed forward. Abigal’s nipples were huge, the dark brown aureole covering almost the whole area of the breast. Abigal’s thatch was black, and a heavy line of down marched up, across her stomach, and surrounded her huge, protruding navel. Mr. Opdycke knew that this was not beautiful, knew that in some ways it was unsightly, but he pulled at himself with abandon. Abigal turned around and tested the bathwater. She bent over to do this, and Mr. Opdycke went into a frenzy. Abigal’s backside was the true object of Opdycke’s lust, a huge world of flesh where a man might live happily ever after. Mr. Opdycke knew Abigal Skinner’s behind by memory, knew where it puckered and dimpled, knew how it shook whenever she made the slightest little move. Opdycke was determined to own that globe, to mount the hill and claim it as his own. Abram Skinner’s presence was no deterrent. Indeed, if Mr. Opdycke understood correctly the implications of much of what J. B. Hope said, it would speak worse of Abram if he made any objection. No one spoke much of these implications but (and Mr. Opdycke came into his own hand, hot and thick) Opdycke was going to do something about that.
Roadwork
Hope, Ontario, 1983
Wherein our young Biographer decides to Take some Air and Exercise.
I woke up and knew it was time for some roadwork.
Beside me snored Mona. She lay on her stomach, awkwardly spread-eagled, her face crushed against the mattress. There were no sheets on the bed; Mona, thrashing during an obviously bad dream, had hurled them clear across the room. I studied Mona’s backside, and knew that it was time for some roadwork. I said the word aloud, speaking it to the fat yellow sun perched on the windowsill. “Roadwork,” said I.
Mona seemed to have little intention of waking up. The sun told me that it was between nine and ten o’clock in the morning, so she had some time before the legal Ontario bar opening of eleven, and at any rate I judged that The Willing Mind and its regulars weren’t overly fussy about legal hours.
Mona flipped over on to her back, so suddenly that I had no chance to get out of the way. A set of enormous knuckles clipped me on the bridge of my nose.
Mona’s snoring became incredibly loud, each snore serving as a drumroll for the dramatic and regal rise of her breasts.
“Roadwork.”
I jumped off the bed and hunted down my clothes. Items of apparel, both Mona’s and mine, were strewn everywhere. It looked as if a hurricane had howled within the tiny room. I dressed and then tiptoed through the door, perfectly aware that there was no need for quiet. Mona, I imagined, could sleep through almost anything. But such is how I chose to vacate the room, furtively, holding my boots in my hand until the heavy door was shut behind me.
The staircase to the rear parking lot lay at the opposite end of the hall; halfway down the hall was another staircase, wider and more substantially constructed. I guessed that it led down to The Willing Mind tavern itself, and decided to take it. I certainly didn’t want to face Joe, still tied up outside, howling occasionally at the waking world. It wasn’t the hound’s bite or even his bark I was afraid of, it was his bloodshot, leery eyes.
By the time I arrived at the bottom of the staircase, I was in pitch blackness. The dark surprised me, coming all at once and with no real warning. I pushed at the walls around me, at first methodically and soon with something like panic, and finally one gave way and took me through to The Willing Mind.
“Hey-hey-hey!!” Big Bernie sat in his usual place, a nicely chilled martoony in front of him. But Big Bernie was not wearing his four-dollar hairpiece, and I was startled to discover that he wasn’t simply mostly bald, he was totally and absolutely bald. Neither did Big Bernie have his tinted glasses on, and his eyes, which I always imagined to be as fat and languid as the rest of him, were like those of a cornered wildcat. “It’s Paulie!” Big Bernie announced to the assembled.
They were all there, Jonathon Whitecrow and the two Kims, who were locked together as usual. The boy Kim was wearing only a pair of underwear, white BVDs, while the other Kim was wearing a negligee. She was quite obviously naked underneath it, a happy assortment of fattish bulges. It was definitely time for some roadwork.
All this was somewhat alarming, but nothing more so than the appearance of Jonathon Whitecrow, who would have needed considerable cosmetic improvement to look dead. Jonathon Whitecrow was quivering. Sitting in front of him was a shotglass full of whiskey, but every time Jonathon reached for it his hand began to shake so violently that picking it up became impossible, and he would pull his hand back and rest it on his lap, where it twitched like a wounded animal.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” answered Jonathon, forcing a smile. Sweat ran off his high forehead, made his hair hang in thick, tattered clumps. “I’m just a wee bit hanged over.”
“Yeah,” Big Bernie put in. “Moi aussi.”
“I get fairly bad hangovers,” Whitecrow explained. “Gruesome.” He made another attempt to pick up the shotglass, even managed to touch his fingers to its side. Then his hand jerked away suddenly, knocking the drink but fortunately not upsetting it.
“Fucking piss!” he snarled. “Fucking goddam whiskey.”
Kim disengaged herself from Kim and turned toward Jonathon. “You want some help, Mr. Whitecrow?”
“Yes.” Jonathon stared straight ahead as he said this, stared into the mirror that lurked behind the bottles of liquor.
Kim reached over and picked up the shotglass. She touched it to Whitecrow’s lips, and he more or less inhaled the whiskey. After a few moments, his shaking stopped. “Ah.” The whiskey bottle sat on the wooden counter, and Jonathon poured himself another measure with a steady hand.
“Hey, Paulie,” said Big Bernie, “if you want a little pick-me-up drinky-poo, just go and help yourself.”
“No,” I answered, although God knows I longed for a little pick-me-up drinky-poo. “No, thanks. I’m gonna go do some roadwork.”
“Sometimes,” Big Bernie reflected, “I need a little pick-me-up drinky-poo in the morning.” It was hard to talk to Big Bernie with his gleaming bald head and panic-stricken eyes. It was likewise hard to talk to Kim in his BVDs, Kim in her negligee and Jonathon Whitecrow in general.
“Good morning!” said a voice. I have to admit, it was even a welcome voice.
“Hiya, Little Bernie!” I responded.
“Every morning I wake up, it’s the same friggin’ thing,” complained the stomach. “Back in this old dump.”
“It’s better than some places,” commented Big Bernie.
“So, Hemingway, what are you doing here? Have you come so that you and me could get together on this book deal? Hey, listen, I had another idea for a title. This is a lot classier than Straight From the Gut. Get this: An Unbounded Stomach. Is that class or what? It’s Shakespeare, no less! You like it?”
“Pretty good,” I mumbled.
“Pretty good?!” shouted Little Bernie, outraged. “Hey, Mister F. Shoo Fitzwerrit, I haven’t heard you come out with any great ideas!”
“I got to go,” I told the assembled. “I got to do some road-work.”
I hitch-hiked home, getting a lift from a thirteen-year-old boy driving a huge red Dodge. The boy sat behind the wheel, steering with one finger, using his other hand to hold a cigarette. The boy and I did not make much conversation. When I told him that I lived at the Quinton place he gave me an odd look. The boy dropped me at the bottom of the laneway and did not turn on to the property.
>
I hadn’t run for some days, not since I lived in Toronto and was happily married to Elspeth. We usually ran together, Elspeth setting a panting pace, her arms and legs turning with cool precision as I clomped along behind. I enjoyed running behind Elspeth and staring at her muscled backside. Elspeth wore nylon running shorts, and with every footfall the material would flip up and the pantie portion could be seen digging into her rump. Needless to say, Elspeth was oblivious to this.
I put on my shorts, shoes and a T-shirt that had a picture of a moose on it. I stretched out of doors, limbering up on the stonework patio. The day was a beautiful one, cloudless and still; after a few stretches I was coated in perspiration, hot and slick. That, after all, is the purpose of roadwork.
Then I lit out for the territories.
My plan was to run to Lookout Lake and back, a distance of some five miles. This, I figured, entitled me to five guilt-free beers. Then I remembered that Canada is a metric country, so I converted the distance to eight-plus kilometers, upping my liquid reward to as many ales.
I knew from the outset that it was going to be a long and odd run. I hadn’t gone more than ten yards before a sharp, pointed pain materialized near my heart. “Hi! Mind if I join you?” I did my best to ignore it.
Out there they cover the gravel roads with a layer of black stuff so that passing cars don’t raise huge clouds of dust. This stuff (I understand it’s crankshaft oil, but I’ll call it what everyone out there calls it, goosh) had for me an overwhelmingly nostalgic aroma. Of course, I couldn’t identify the scent of goosh with anything specific, but it filled me with my childhood and made the sharp pointed pain jump up and down. I ran harder, so hard that the goosh-related memory almost came to me. It had to do with wargames, clods of dirt fired from slingshots; it had to do with a time when the world seemed to make mathematical sense (and the only mathematics I knew was what four plus three made: six).
At that point I bounced to my left to avoid stepping on a snake. I don’t know why I bothered. The snake was dead already, paper-thin, flattened by a car’s tire. The sun had dried its skin and bones, and in a few hours there wouldn’t be anything left but snake-dust.
I took off my T-shirt and tied it around my head. I was sweating everywhere, even from my elbows and kneecaps, which is, of course, what roadwork is all about.
I remembered naked Mona, and for some reason that made me increase my pace substantially. The sharp, pointed pain attached itself to my heart so that it wouldn’t get thrown clear.
Various parts of my body began a debate as to just whose idea this goddam roadwork was. My legs were perhaps the loudest, screaming incoherently about spasms and seizures. My stomach and digestive tract pointed out that there was no real food to work with; they’d salvaged what energy they could from the little reservoirs of alcohol that I’d left scattered about, but it just wasn’t enough. Scotty, the Chief Engineer down there, estimated I could last another three-quarters of a mile. Meanwhile, my muscles unionized and complained about the horrid conditions, how they were being viciously bounced along a gravel road in ninety-degree weather; and my shriveled, dehydrated corpuscles began to wail for water.
Whose idea was this? they all demanded.
My tiny heart remained silent, muffled in the sharp, pointed pain. I ran faster.
To take my mind off the pain, I lifted my eyes skyward. One lone fubsy cloud sat in the sky. I prayed that some wind would blow it over the face of the sun. I was sweating from my ears, and in another mile I was sweating from my eyes.
By the time I reached Lookout Lake I was sweated out, so hot I was chilly and goose-pimpled. My body insisted on throwing up, even though I was as dry as snake-dust, empty except for the sharp, pointed pain. After many long minutes of dry heaving I lay down by the water and went to sleep.
I dreamed, for the first time, of Joseph Benton Hope.
The Cold Freedom
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1852
Regarding the pastimes of Hope, we know the following: that he was a Fisherman. Indeed, it is of some scholarly interest that it was a clergyman and personal acquaintance of J. B. Hope’s who, in 1847, produced the 1st American edition of Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Hope was given an inscribed copy (which presently resides in the Rare Books Room of Harvard University). The inscription reads:
To Jsph. Hope,
from
Geo. Washington Bethune
Apr. 19, the Yr. of our Lord, 1847
Good fortune, & good fishing!!
The men were fishing.
This was one way they’d found to supplement the House’s pitiful income, pulling fish out of the Merrimack. If not for their proximity to the dark river, Hope and his Perfectionists would likely have starved to death. Their periodical, The Theocratic Watchman, was supported by private donation, and after its weekly publication there were few dollars left over. George Quinton brought in some money, earned doing odd jobs and chores throughout the city. The De-la-Noys performed the occasional melodrama, but Lowell, a brand-new city of stonework factories, had no taste for either Adam’s heroics or Mary’s bosom-pitching.
Abram Skinner fished the river most frequently, virtually every waking hour. He felt useless in the city and longed for his rows of grain, the huge steaming mountains of compost. Hope encouraged Abram to contribute articles to The Theocratic Watchman, and Abram had tried, but he found he always became whatever the stylographic equivalent of tongue-tied was, producing smudgy pages of sentence fragments that made no real sense. So Abram had started fishing the Merrimack, not only for the meat, but for the comfort he found beside the water.
Abram often had company. Mr. Opdycke enjoyed fishing for the same reason schoolboys enjoy fishing—that is, he was usually supposed to be doing something else. Opdycke had certain house responsibilities, mostly janitorial, but he fobbed them off on George Quinton and always had much time on his hands. Mr. Opdycke was an ingenious, if lazy, angler, a great one for setting out a series of trotlines and then snoozing beneath the sun. The deceit and treachery of the new sport appealed to Opdycke; he delighted in discovering new ways of concealing hooks inside tiny fishes, in discovering the most tantalizing way of dancing them in the water.
George Quinton, those times he was free, was an avid fisherman, although his clumsiness cost him a lot of his potential catch (and, the others felt, their’s as well; Quinton was incapable of doing anything quietly, and even his tiptoeing and whispering likely drove the fish miles downstream). George was always welcome, though. The men would give him a dangling seining dish and order him to find bait. George had a knack for catching fingerlings and minnows, supplying the anglers with more than they could ever use, and the odd thing about it (something George kept a secret from them) was that he didn’t use the net at all. George knelt by the water, bearlike and patient, and scooped out the fish with his massive hands.
Another of George’s responsibilities was pole assembly. The men’s rods were cane, two four- to five-foot pieces that had to be tied together. Everyone made George do this for them; Mr. Opdycke out of slothfulness, Abram Skinner because he thought that George enjoyed doing such things, and Adam De-la-Noy because he couldn’t master the trick of knotting the sections together for himself.
Before becoming a Perfectionist, Adam De-la-Noy had never fished. He had never considered it. “Angling” was a decidedly ungentlemanly sport to engage in, not to mention malodorous. Adam disliked baiting his lure (usually Mr. Opdycke did it for him anyway, running the hook’s shank down the little creatures’ gullets) and the few times Adam had caught something he’d become alarmed, even frightened, handing his quivering rod to whoever happened to be standing nearby. Still, Adam seemed to prefer the company of the men to that of the women, and he spent much time with them beside the Merrimack River.
Surprisingly, even amazingly, J. B. Hope was perhaps the most enthusiastic practitioner of the Art of the Angle. Each dawn would find Joseph on the riverbank, his line in the water, his tiny eye glaring at t
he surface. Hope claimed to be able to see a fish approach his bait, and his performance bore him out. Hope was a “snap-fisherman,” pulling the fish out of the water as soon as the bait was touched. The others were “pouchers,” waiting until the bait was all but swallowed before hauling the prize upward. And there were never any false-sets or errant jerks when Joseph fished, just one sure, quick lift and the thing was landed. What the others wondered at most was Hope’s expertise, the deft way he made his horsehair line, small perfect knots that never broke, the manner in which he grabbed fishes by their gills and plucked out the hook.
Hope alone fished for something other than food. As he waved his line out upon the water, Joseph would cackle, heckle and taunt the prey. “Come now!” J. B. Hope would call. “Let’s don’t dally! You are peckish, don’t deny it!” Hope’s boyish teasing alarmed the men somehow, and each was saddened in his heart, for Joseph was more open and friendly with the fish than ever he’d been with them.
Sometimes Joseph Hope would fish for a monster. According to Hope, the water contained a colussus, a veritable leviathan, a mammoth as big as a man. Hope never told them why he thought such a beast existed, but none ever doubted his faith. When fishing for this brute, Hope would turn each successive catch into bait, so that he took progressively bigger fish. He often ended up fishing with a massive sucker on the end of his line, a hulk so big that only a whale would be tempted.
On this particular day, all five men were fishing, and Joseph Hope was being outfished. Hope was not a competitive fisherman, at least not in terms of his fellow human beings (he enjoyed confronting the animals, one on one) but he couldn’t help wondering what he was doing wrongly that Mr. Opdycke was doing right. Opdycke (on lip-hooked minnows; a departure for Opdycke, but Hope’s usual manner) had taken seven fish in an hour —Hope had pulled out four. Joseph, though, was too aloof to ask. He simply rebaited his hook and tried again.
The Life of Hope Page 16