Once You Break a Knuckle

by W. D. Wilson

  So that night, a week ago, I slurped beer suds and racked my brain for questions a grade ten kid could puzzle through. My wife sipped from a ceramic mug that had a picture of the two of us hoisting a trout. When she finished her drink, she rattled the meltwater ice cubes, and I shuffled to the kitchen to fix another. A good husband must do something kind and unique for his wife every day. Nothing else makes sense.

  —Ever wonder if we could’ve done better? she said when I came back.

  —We’ve done okay, I said, and passed her the drink, which she took in both hands like an offering.

  —I want him to stay like he is. A boy. I don’t want him to be like us.

  —Like me?

  —That’s not what I said.

  The day after we met, on that beach near Saskatoon, my wife showed me how to gather barnacles for protein. She shanked a pocket knife between the rock and the shell and popped the creature off like a coat snap, this grin on her face like nothing in the world could be more fun. I never got the hang of it. She has stopped showing me how.

  —We’re not unhappy, I tell my wife.

  —Don’t you ever wonder if you could have done better? she says, and she looks at me with eyes grown wise and disappointed.

  Gauss’s first wife died in 1809, complications from childbirth. A number of people have recounted the scene at her deathbed – how he squandered her final moments, how he spent precious hours preoccupied with a new puzzle in number theory. These tales are all apocryphal. These are the tales of a lonely man. Picture them, Gauss with his labourer’s shoulders juddering, Johanna in bed with her angel’s hair around her like a skimmer dress, his cheek on the bedside, snub nose grazing her ribs. He’ll remarry, yes, and love his new spouse. He’ll father three devout middle-class sons unafraid to scull for their lot. He’ll become a mathematician scholars name when they talk about the Big Five.

  But picture him, the Prince of Mathematics, as he closes Johanna’s eyes with his stumpy, working-class hands. Things he notices: her immaculate, cream-coloured fingers; the dint on her eyebrow from banging it on a grandfather clock; the wallpaper they installed themselves, herringboned and crooked near the ceiling where he had to balance on his drafter’s bench. And Gauss suddenly realizes the whole place smells like chamomile tea. Maybe it’s too much for him. He needs a drink, which will become a pattern – one or two gentleman’s glasses while he idles, sometimes more when the missus takes the boys out of town. His face puckers at the edges, not tears, but fear. He can’t know what will happen next: and what is more terrifying to a mathematician than the unknowable?

  It’s 1994, the International Year of the Family, but my wife is crossing the Rockies, or browsing a trade show in Calgary, or driving a 1969 forest-green GTO south to the American border. If she’s in the Rockies, she’s got her sister with her; she’s fucking a twenty-four-year-old cowboy, Gus, if she’s in Calgary; and if she’s on the way to the border then she’s tucked my son beneath a yellow hotel blanket, because she’s taking him away from here, away from the drudgery he’ll suffer as a boy in a small town, from the hockey louts he’ll fall in with and the mill job he’ll get locked into and the girl he’ll drug with Rohypnol in 2003. And I’m in my backyard. I’m building a heliotrope. And it’s well past dark and I’ve been drinking, I won’t lie. I’ve been drinking. See, I don’t know where my wife is. I don’t know where she’s taken my son. But I do know I caused it, I’ve done something wrong – because I’m a man, a mere math teacher, and I have certain specific inadequacies, none of which are the fault of mathematics.

  RECEPTION

  I spent the winter break of my graduating year alone with an aging tom. It was a year when Invermere suffered heavy snowfall in time for Christmas, and the city plows combed the streets in a way that left great palisades across the driveway. Each morning I chipped at this barricade with an aluminum shovel until I’d carved a gap my truck could squeeze through.

  Weeks ago everything had gone to shit. Lightning split a tree in the front yard and magnetized all the electronics in the house, including the clocks, so it was always one thirty-nine that December. Mitch Cooper, a long-time buddy, cracked his house’s foundation when the clutch of his family’s Jeep caught in first gear, and it’d be years before his folks let him live that one down. Then my old man took a bullet to the chest in Kosovo. Twenty-three years in the Force and he’d only twice gone without his Kevlar. His lung collapsed. The doctors at the base reinflated it, pried the bullet out, and sent him home. He was on a plane back, or on a train to get on a plane back, or in a car, on the road, in a country, driving fast, to get on a train, to get on a plane back. The RCMP wasn’t one-hundred percent. But they’d let me know.

  It was three weeks between when my old man got shot and when he returned. In that short time, relics of him appeared around the house: I found an instrument for testing grip strength wedged under a couch cushion; the cat knocked a silver RCMP tie pin off the fridge; downstairs, a canvas punching bag, worn and sweat-stained at the midsection, ripped from its ceiling hook. I fired up the uninsured Bonneville in the garage to see if the damned thing still worked, and the inside smelled of shaving cream and Old Spice deodorant and a trace of spilled beer – it smelled like my old man.

  Months earlier, I’d driven him and that Bonneville to the airport in Cranbrook, a shithole city best described as a place even the hicks think a bit too small-town. My old man squashed into passenger with only a duffle bag for luggage. It held three items: his electric razor, his judo gi, and a balled-up gold chain the Force wouldn’t let him hang around his neck. He wore his dark glasses and a black T-shirt that read: You Can Run, but You Can Also Scream.

  The Bonneville’s dashboard looked like the heads-up display from a space fighter, complete with a wire-frame model of the car that changed from green to yellow to red as parts broke down or took damage. My old man watched the speedometer the whole way and if I notched it above one hundred he’d threaten to commandeer the vehicle. I warned that if he didn’t stop heckling me I’d drive over a cliff. He said all it would take is one good punch to the neck and I’d be out cold. I asked if he meant the head and he just slapped his fist against his palm. Then he made a call on his cellphone, to his friend Darren Berninger, and told Berninger to be without mercy in busting me for speeding. In fact, my old man said, one eye levelled at me through dark glass, be a little unfair.

  We talked about upcoming movies and he asked me to send him a DVD of The Bourne Supremacy. I offered to mail him the cat. He respectfully declined. At the airport, a young security guard with nervous hands detained my old man for a key chain fashioned like little handcuffs. They could be used as thumb traps, the guard said. To cut off a person’s thumbs. My old man deadpanned the poor bastard and said if anyone actually got caught like that, they didn’t deserve thumbs.

  On the night he finally returned, my buddy Mitch came over.

  It was late by then, dusk. From the couch I could see the yard and the road through the front window, and Mitch pulled up in his oxblood Rocket 88. He didn’t drive that car in the winter if he had a choice since the street salt could threaten the undercarriage. It was a 1953 vintage beast, a car more attitude than metal. Mitch’s old man, Larry, purchased it from some hick twenty years earlier. Larry was a birdwatcher by trade, the kind of guy who could wear a coonskin hat and not as a joke. With fifteen thousand dollars and the patience of a birdwatcher, he teased that car from ratbag to beauty.

  I met Mitch at the door. He wore a leather jacket and some leather gloves and a grey scarf. I’d known Mitch since I was eight years old. He was all long arms and bony knees, had a terrier’s bouncy eyes. A scar dented his cheek where a pebble got embedded when, at the age of ten, he crashed his bike into a yard umbrella. He stood six-five, shorter than he’d end up, but I barely topped his collar. When we were kids I made him look spindly, but he’d filled out, lifted weights, ate enough for his parents to joke about making him pitch in on the food budget.

  —
How’s it going, Will? he said. He didn’t take off his coat or his shoes and he didn’t step out of the entryway.

  —You okay? I said.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets, rolled his neck and let his shoulders lower. When he stood like that he looked like the right kid to pick on. But I had seen those shoulders pulled back. I had seen him bare his gums. —Just tired, he said, and moved his arms in a way to flex his chest, his biceps. —Been helping my dad clean the windows. Fucking hicks egged them again.

  We went to the kitchen. I offered to make him coffee and he accepted, even though it was well past dinner. Once, in tenth grade, Mitch bought an espresso machine for his room and shotgunned three solid cups, and I guess the caffeine mainlined to his brain because he charged out the front door. Hours later he returned with a limp and a sprained ankle and mud stamped across his chest like paw prints.

  —It’ll be good to see your dad again, Mitch said.

  —He left a message a few days ago. He’s in transit.

  —How is he?

  —Mostly angry, I said, and Mitch grinned like a boy.

  I put only enough water in the pot for two cups. Mitch toyed with the salt shaker – a canister painted to look like a cop’s pepper spray.

  —My dad wants to have you guys over, Mitch said. Steam lisped out the coffee maker and I waited for the drip. Mitch set the shaker down. Larry wanted my old man over for dinner to talk about the hicks, and my old man would oblige him, because we’d all been friends so long.

  Mitch exhaled and his breath hung dewy in the air. —It’s really cold in here, he said.

  —I don’t have the heat on too high.

  The placemat in front of him was crooked so he straightened it. —You’ll freeze the pipes.

  —I won’t freeze the pipes, I said and waved a hand at him.

  He went to the thermostat and cranked it. As the baseboards heated they filled the kitchen with the scent of old metal. —Your dad will sleeper-choke you if those pipes damage.

  —He could try.

  —And then he’d sleeper-choke me.

  I gave Mitch his coffee in a mug that showed a picture of Darren Berninger poking at a fire with the busted end of a Calgary Flames hockey stick. The caption read: Burn, Fat Man, Burn.

  Then headlights flashed through the living room drapes and Mitch and I went to the window. A patrol car pulled into the driveway. The RCMP drove white Impalas with push-bars on the fronts to buffet deer and motorists who’d decided to run the gauntlet. Fake bullet holes stickered the hood and the driver’s door – it was my old man’s car, fifteen-Charlie-seven, the same one he’d driven for eleven years.

  Mitch’s Rocket plugged the only shovelled entrance to the driveway, so my old man had to plow through the snowbank. The car shuddered quiet and my old man climbed out, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him assembling beside the car. He slung a duffle bag over his shoulder. He shut the car door with his boot. Dark glasses covered his eyes and he wore a blue winter coat, open, and he hadn’t shaved his moustache as a matter of family luck. The RCMP crest was emblazoned on his breast.

  My old man doesn’t walk. My old man doesn’t saunter. He picks a destination and he wills himself to that destination. But, in winter, the front yard had a defence: a lone rosebush with its limbs laden and limp over the icy walkway. My old man was fixed on the front door and I guess he didn’t see the rose stalk that swayed at eye level because he collided with it at a pretty good tilt. His head snapped back and his hand went to his face and the duffle bag hit the ground. Years later, he’d blame the glasses but I’d point out that it was his fault for wearing sunglasses at night. He’d tell me that if I broke into song he’d punch me in the ribs. I’d break into song. He’d punch me in the ribs.

  Mitch and I looked at each other. My old man’s cheek went bright red and his nostrils flared like a stallion’s. There was a maroon welt in the fleshy cove beneath his eye. He dabbed blood with his thumb.

  The bastard cat sagged off the couch and stood beside us. I grabbed a tissue from a box on the gimped coffee table my old man and I had accidentally split in two down the middle. The door opened and he stepped through and I offered him the tissue. He pressed it to the wound. The cat mewled. I’ve heard it said that cats talk to humans more than they talk to other cats, even in the wild, as an attempt to domesticate us. My old man blinked at the cat and growled; he would not be domesticated by the likes of that tom.

  Then: —Son.

  We hugged like men. He was leaner than I remembered and he didn’t squeeze very hard. Later I would realize the significance of that, of the open coat which, closed, would snug too tightly over his bruised chest. The duffle bag slid off his shoulder and he eased it down without bending his torso. When he removed his coat I saw his Kosovo Force T-shirt; it showed a bandana-wearing bulldog chained to a wrecked wall:

  KFOR

  If you can’t run with the big dogs, go sit in the food bowl.

  —How’s it going Mr. Crease, Mitch said. He extended a hand.

  My old man clasped it and he and Mitch stared at one another, eye to eye. To this day, Mitch is the only friend I have who will hold that gaze. —It’s still going, Mitch, my old man said. —How’s your dad?

  —He’s my dad.

  —Amen to that.

  —He wants to have you guys over, Mitch said.

  My old man held on. He and Larry got along well enough but they came from different worlds. —Well, you guys just let me know when.

  —Tomorrow night.

  —Alright.

  My old man tossed his coat onto his shoes and inspected the house. He remarked at the poor state of each room. In the den, fingerprints gummed the computer screen and the wood stove was grainy with charcoal. Did I even bother to vacuum? Is the cat still shitting behind the goddamned toilet? I told him I’d followed his instructions and not wrecked the house and what did he expect, leaving an eighteen-year-old in charge for six months?

  After the inspection he dug into his duffle bag and revealed two liquor bottles the size of champagne flasks. The corks were secured by duct tape and the bottle swam with the colour of morning sky. Inside each was a wooden cross, swollen so its ends brushed the glass and tinked when my old man handled them. He hefted one in each fist.

  —Rakia, he said, pronouncing it rock-ya. He set one of the bottles above the fridge in the liquor cupboard. —You didn’t drink all my booze?

  —You told me not to.

  He unwrapped the duct tape from the second bottle and uncorked it. Then he fished three short glasses from the cupboard and lined them up.

  —Sorry, Mr. Crease, I don’t think my –

  —Have a drink with us Mitch, my old man said.

  The liquid he filled each glass with was the colour of watery eyes. It smelled vaguely like pears and churned with wood pulp. He handed one glass to me and one to Mitch and then he raised his own.

  —To coming home, he said.

  The rakia tasted like a pinecone dipped in rubbing alcohol. Mitch, poor Mitch, was red faced and coughing after just a sample. Mitch drank coolers if at all. I could feel the liquor all the way down and my old man told us the trick was to hold your breath and swallow at the last possible instant.

  —It’s bottled by nuns, he said as he downed what remained in his glass. He held up his index and thumb barely apart, as though pinching a nickel between them. —They put this little cross in each bottle and it swells. You’re both sissies.

  Later, after Mitch left, my old man and I sat on opposite couches watching the dark television. He was half-covered by a blanket and lying where the cat would normally curl up. The bastard creature perched on the back of the couch, waiting for its chance to move in. A glass of rakia nestled on my old man’s chest. The cat wouldn’t look at him but he made faces at it.

  He tipped the glass up and let a mouthful of rakia slide down his throat. I watched him swallow and exhale a long, slow breath. —This is watered down. Me and Lou couldn’t even handle on
e shot of the stuff before they bottle it.

  —What about the nuns?

  My old man winced and I don’t know if it was the rakia or not. —The way I see it, son, never get involved with a woman who can drink you to the floor.

  —They’re nuns.

  —That’s not the point, he said.

  —A nun drank you to the floor.

  —That’s not what I said.

  I threatened to tell the other cops that he had been out-drunk by a nun and he threatened to acquaint my skull with his fist. I said I had nothing to fear from a man who was floored by a nun and he said if it wasn’t for the goddamned cat, who would take his spot as soon as he stood up, he’d show me why they called him the Kid of Granite.

  —You didn’t think to get the TV fixed? my old man said, after a time.

  —Insurance is supposed to come look at it.

  —You have to pester them.

  —I’ve been a little preoccupied, you know, you getting shot and all, I said.

  —You’ve been a little preoccupied?

  I dropped silent at that. We didn’t talk for minutes. My old man was not supposed to be the type I could scathe. I picked at my fingernails and he sipped at his rakia and then the cat padded down to his torso and my old man yelled out – a deep, throaty sound like a winded man huffing his breath on the dirt. The cat leaped two feet into the air and yowled. My old man sat up, bent in two, the last swallows of his rakia spilled on his shirt in a dark V. His hand clenched his chest, under the left breast. The fabric dimpled around his fingers.

  —Dad? I said.

  He rocked back and forth. I can’t remember a single event in all my life as awkward as those moments when I stood helpless in front of him, hands tensed at my sides, his eyes squinched shut and his jaw clamped and Jesus, what had this done to him?