Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  He rolled his shoulders and fished out his earphones and distracted himself with a movie. Henry often went away to work but came back. Now he would have to stay and resolve a few things. He knew why he was leaving work but he wasn’t sure why he returned to Newfoundland. Home. It held a gravity, some kind of atmospheric orbit that spiralled him towards the centre whenever he exhausted things out there in the world. Jesus I sound like a salmon. Like a lot of Newfoundlanders, though, he pictured an acre of land in his head that was his land. The picture has no location, it’s a floating acre with a perforated edge like a postage stamp that hovers slightly above the land, though there is, of course, a view of the Atlantic. He understands this image to be romantic and unrealistic, and yet sometimes in foreign beds, rather than imagining a woman to keep him unlonely, he will think of this two hundred by two hundred view. He was thinking of it now, just weeks after that party at John and Silvia’s—an acre of land that belongs to Tender Morris, and Martha worried about what to do with Tender’s heritage—as his plane flew into a dark blizzard, the airplane pounded by weather, a bright snow flurry against the tracking lights on the wings and the woman next to him, who had watched a movie with a two-dollar headset she’d had to buy with her credit card. She pulled out a black plug from the armrest and said she was prone to panic attacks and, if it came to it, would Henry hold her. Henry removed an earbud to understand her. They made a descent and the plane shuddered and the tarmac zoomed up a little too fast in the plastic porthole and the landing gear jerked out of the frozen wings—they were inches from the runway and the woman next to him grabbed his arm and gripped it tight. The seams of the plane groaned as the fuselage twisted sideways a little and Henry thought whoa so this is it. The belly of the plane lifted and the landing gear tucked itself away again under the wing and the captain on the intercom, in a voice touched with receding panic, said the computers would not let them land in this weather. They flew a thousand kilometres back the way they had come and it took every kilometre for the alarm to melt away. They touched down at three in the morning in Halifax where, as they deplaned, they were all handed a 1-800 number to rebook. The woman who had sat next to him said what do we do now. She was a novice of the airways. We get a hotel room, Henry said. And let that hang ambiguously. They took their bags and had a drink in the lounge and Henry ate a chicken souvlaki while she made a phone call and told him about the local documentary film business and her two kids and her husband. He was surprised to hear she flew all the time. I guess she doesn’t fly strapped to the bulwark with a nylon cord in the hull of a Hercules with no seats, he thought. They talked and Henry realized this woman loved her husband. He explained he had just quit work because he helped break a man’s arms. Not just one arm but both of them. The man has to go back to Cape Breton to live with his mother. He can’t even open a door.

  They spoke about their lives. The woman was good at prying him open but it was also the circumstance of knowing he’d never see this woman again. I don’t know to what I’m returning, Henry said. There is a woman, he admitted. But he didn’t know. What he did know was he might be giving up on airplanes.

  The next morning he found her with a cup of styrofoam coffee in the lobby and they shared a taxi like old friends out to the airport and flew again over a white clear land and underneath the plane Henry saw the contour of the land he was to love, the little bird islands he’d kayaked around with Nora Power years ago, the little cove where Tender’s summer house stood. Could he see Tender’s house. No, that was a roof he could not pick out. All the houses looked like heads buried in the sand. What is this compulsion to see a house, he thought. What he wanted to see, he felt instinctively, was Martha Groves staring up at him, giving a big wave.

  They landed in St John’s at midday. He watched the woman he’d almost spent the night with as she strode quickly away to meet her husband who had the kids, still with their winter hoods up. No, he hadn’t almost spent the night with her—he’d turned the corner on women. He was faithful, as this woman is. I’m a changed man, he thought, and allowed the cab manager to shepherd him into an orange taxi that drove him downtown to John and Silvia’s where he was still renting that room but not for long.

  18

  He phoned Martha.

  That house, he said. Let’s go look at it.

  She couldn’t that day as she had to be in town to finish up with a patient who had hip dysplasia—she was helping the man with his adductor squeeze. Henry waited for the weekend. He drove her down the shore to Renews and they spent the night in John and Silvia’s summer place. In separate beds. It was freezing. There was a darkness in some of Martha’s silences, a realization that things could not go on between them because of what had already happened. It was almost misery, is what he saw in her. But there was something brand new too, like the swipe of window wipers refreshing the glass. Her eyes pushed away the darkness and she was with him again. He was ready to give over even though the idea of sleeping together seemed perverse. One thing had led to another which led to the beds and they were both relieved about the beds and their easy independent access to them. I want to be good, Henry said to his own stomach as he undressed and climbed into the sheets.

  In the morning they walked over to the cemetery and visited the new grave. It looked ugly. Cold and wet and the snow didn’t even cover things. The soil had settled and frozen and heaved up again. He was buried in there like an improvised device. They would have to groom it in the spring.

  Then they visited Tender’s house.

  The doors were locked and Martha did not have a key. Henry sized up the interior the way Tender trained him to do reconnaissance. The house, from the outside, looked to have good bones. He stepped back and stared at the eaves and the corners of the house were plumb. He fell back into the snow and stared up at this thing that someone he had no connection to had built. The front and back porches, the sills were gone and the porches were falling away from the heart of the house. The electric service cut off. The doors and the porches made it easy to defend from the inside.

  Tender wanted to do this place up.

  He had ambitions, Henry said.

  I’ve been inside.

  You’ve walked through it.

  I like it.

  Henry turned around. To be next to John and Silvia, but I don’t know.

  He tried to touch her shoulder the way a friend would, a caring person. He thought of the woman on the plane. Someone not sexual. Martha was overwhelmed with what had occurred and what her life was now to become. She needed and enjoyed distraction. Henry tried his best. He was exercising new ways of arranging his limbs. It is possible to be someone else, or the portion of you that doesn’t get exercised often. He thought too about that artist and how he should return to her and tell her that the way she was falling was not anything like how a soldier’s legs break from under him and soldiers rarely are killed in open fire. Soldiers are blown apart, their uniforms are shredded at the site of wear, and the stomachs are pierced, the neck ripped and the feet torn off as are the hands. What you find are torsos in full battle rattle and the torsos will collapse if run over, a body will dry out very quickly and turn into flattened rags.

  19

  John came home and dancing broke out at three in the morning—a spontaneous call for a taxi to deliver a forty-ouncer. Silvia woke up at dawn with the kids, exhausted and accepting, and said they wanted to go skating. It was Saturday. Henry fell into a car with a bag of cheese sandwiches on his lap, a car that drove to Dead Man’s Pond. Martha was driving as she hadn’t been drinking. John held an open jar of green olives between his knees, shoving his fingers into the wide mouth, trying to fish them out and hand the olives over to any mouth that would open. You mean, he said, you put up with all of us all night long completely sober? It was trying, Martha said. The jar was empty when they got to the pond and John poured the brine out on the snow. Henry helped shovel off the pond, hungover, and just lay there next to the aluminum shovel with John Hynes still drin
king American cans of pilsner as there was some brewery strike across the country. It felt like anything he looked at was made of aluminum. They watched the women in their white leather skates flash in the dull sunlight. We used to do this, John said, with hockey sticks.

  With Tender Morris in goal.

  Tender Morris, John said, was a loyal man.

  A deep sadness crept into Henry’s shoulders as he realized his own tendencies made him a shit. A shit but hell he was doing the best he could.

  Tender accompanied them when they hit the red light district approved without paperwork by the generals. He oversaw things. Tender Morris loved the army life though he did not partake in the tender vittles.

  Martha overheard them. He loved it more than he loved civilian life.

  They made a bonfire. It was heartening to see Martha’s friends circle around her and include her in the social gatherings to make sure she was not alone. She was distracted and liked to laugh and was game for anything that came up. Henry counted off three fingers. But it was almost like she was religious or had some secret pact where she had to live a righteous life

  She’s involved, Henry realized, in some impossible truth. Tender has been dead, what, three months. It was something else in her that was giving off a physical manifestation. Sometimes you see loyalty in the air like that. When things are hard you adjust the dial on your emotions and learn new, complicated emotions that work over the scar tissue of torment and allow the face and hands to convey a manner of grace. Thanks be to god for that.

  Martha, skating backwards—trusting the surface. After his breakup with Nora, Henry’s friends had taken care of him and now that Tender Morris was gone they were doing the same for Martha. That was obvious. But what suddenly occurred to Henry was that his friends were impatient with him, urging him to pursue a scenario with Martha. He thought this was a private instinct but he understood now the visible traces of intent in the air. They had allowed Martha and Henry to leave that party together at Christmas. The knowledge of this stalled him. What was romantic about an arranged marriage? But he liked looking at her mouth. She has this fine hair down from her navel and she was self-conscious about it. Tender had an idea of airbrushed beauty. Tender, in Afghanistan, had once discussed his perfect woman while they played crib. But what about Martha, Henry had said. Martha’s going to get fat, he said. It was a quick remark that blurted out of Tender and ran against all the grain of what seemed to exist on the ground between the two of them. And that struck Henry as a hard and salient fact, and it worried him, that all the beauty in the world could be ground down by emphatic, cruel statements like that. It made him feel loyal to the things he’d already done with Martha Groves, if Tender felt this way. But perhaps ten percent of a man’s thoughts run this way—can you still blame him for them? Henry was alone, but he’d seen Martha in all the ways that nominal virtue allowed, and he felt guilty about it. He did not know if he could ever get along with a woman, to be honest.

  20

  The trees were covered in glitter ice and orange taxis slid around on baloney tires. A school bus full of kids braked on Kenna’s Hill and slipped sideways through the intersection using all three lanes of road. The driver looked very calm about it. Henry walked a mile in cold weather to the YMCA and worked on the conditioning weights. Sometimes he did that, walk instead of taking the car. He looked at the car and remembered the jeep and could not bring himself to open the door. That was how Tender Morris ended his life and the idea of voluntarily harnessing himself into that position repulsed him. He’d seen a counsellor on his return and did not tell him about this aversion. The army physiotherapist had given Henry a routine to eventually loosen out the kinks from the impact he received from the exploding jeep. Martha had looked over the routine—it was printed on a two-sided laminated sheet that reminded him of scuba diving positions and eastern yoga. She said do this one and this one and not to do the exercises on the other side of the sheet. They’ve all been overturned.

  He watched the news on a flat TV bolted above the running track. The news had no sound, just the anchor interviewing the minister of defence in high definition, their conversation in closed captions. You could understand in ten seconds the power and the status quo of the media and government by studying the national news with the sound off. He thought about Tender Morris and John Hynes. They had all met this minister of defence at the base in Kabul. Tender Morris was in extremely good physical shape at that dinner and then, within three months, they were attending Tender Morris’s funeral.

  He did thirty minutes on the rowing machine and then the exercises Martha recommended. He thought about what she had told him about Tender Morris’s house. A house like that and he could row every day. Martha wasn’t drinking. They were all drunk but she wasn’t. Her righteous life. It was a bit of a drag this no drinking. Could he live with that. There is no telling if it is a truth or a fleeting truth but Henry saw that pervading inertia can take hold. Passive people think the world doesn’t change, but it does and there are forces out there rolling stones and rubbing off moss. Inertia, if you recall, applies to acceleration and deceleration, not to change. Perhaps it was that impulse in him that first started to turn Nora away. Yes, he can see it now. She had loved how different from her he was. He was physical in the world, active, building things, and he used his shoulders and legs. She read books and sat at tables talking with colleagues. She attended meetings. And she realized that, along with the animal pulse in him, he possessed an independent drive to go public with his devotion. A willingness to be slayed, which is what war is. The biggest meeting of all.

  He exercised until the taekwondo class ended then he boosted himself off the equipment and took a shower and dressed and reminded himself of the perversion of his thoughts: try and steer a safe course.

  He walked home in a rifling wind and, instead of heading into Silvia’s house, he shovelled out the car and jumped in and warmed up the engine and drove past Martha’s place. Her car was gone. He knew where the key was. He could let himself in and put the lights on so she’d know someone was there. He could read one of Tender’s books and get educated. Well, his car would be a clue right there. There is no need to frighten her.

  He drove back through town past the new wings of development on the old city—subdivisions he had helped build with John and Tender back in their twenties. As he slowed he saw Silvia sitting in her car in the driveway. She looked like she was crying. Or at least, she had her hands on the wheel in a way that made it look like she was trying to hold on. The wheel was giving her anchorage. Keep driving. He drove to a coffee shop and had a coffee and an old-fashioned donut and read a section of a newspaper from the day before. It was sort of cheerful to know all the news before reading it. An insert with real estate. Illustrations of a house with a saw through it: under construction. John had told him, before heading out west, that the kids were growing and they needed to expand into the finished basement. Would Henry consider, you know, finding his own place.

  I should call first, was his thought. Silvia answered. She was inside the house now. He explained he was moving on. Come over, she said cheerfully.

  The dog helped him open the door then sidled over to him and presented his back. Wolfy. The kids weren’t home yet from school, and John was delayed in Fort Mac. Rick had asked him to stay on another week. They were short men with Henry gone and Jamie Kirby in arm casts.

  Sometimes I’m so involved with my own life, he said, I forget what other people are doing.

  The women around me, Silvia said, they all comment on the day as it’s happening. They say they’re having a wonderful time and isn’t this great. I just want to live it. I want to think about it years from now, and judge it then. But I’m with a man who does this very thing, and it’s made me realize I’m the man and he’s the woman.

  I’ll not mention that to John.

  I miss him, she said. He’s loyal, and he loves. He’s a generous man and he reminds me to be generous. She laughed. It’s like
feeding a lion. If I buy a roast, a big eighty-dollar prime rib for us and the kids, he won’t go to bed until that roast is gone. He’ll sit there at one in the morning with a jar of mayonnaise.

  I’ve seen him in the meat section, Henry said. His nostrils flare at the steaks.

  I’ve never seen anyone quiver with such excitement at meat.

  Henry stroked the dog. He remembered how they got Wolf. John and Silvia and the kids had been swimming around the bay at their summer house when they saw the dog low in the water. The dog had come around a headland and was struggling. The dog’s nose went under, just his ears left, and it was Silvia who waded out to the dog and grabbed him and yelled out to John for help. He was too heavy. There was a cinder block tied to his paw. They got the dog ashore and cut off the rope. They found the owner—an old guy out in Fermeuse. John went up to him, said if you ever do something like that again I’ll come over and ram your teeth down your throat. I ain’t got no teeth to ram down. Then I’ll get a set made for you and ram them down.

  Silvia: Martha told me Tender’s house is for sale.

  It came out of Silvia’s mouth before she knew what she was saying. Henry must have looked puzzled.

  We all know about your night with Martha.

  You don’t seem entirely happy about it.

  I’ve known you too long, Henry.

  He was mainly a friend of John’s and the way Henry was in the world was something she disputed. Silvia was fond of Tender Morris. John had said to Henry once, Have you ever noticed how Tender and Silvia talk?