Best Canadian Stories 2018

by Russel Smith

  “They’re saying I’m heartless! Ira, how can they say I’m heartless?” I can’t see Mom from where I stand in the doorway and kick snow from my shoes. My guess is she’s deep in the septic sludge of the comments section.

  “I told you, it’s a deep, stinky sewer.”

  “Oh, save the I-told-yous.” She’s where I found her yesterday, with her laptop at the kitchen table. Draped over her chair back is the suit jacket she wore to court. “They’re saying nobody cares about who he was.” She points at one of the comments and says, “This asshat is pretending to be a doctor. Alzheimer’s just brings out a person’s true colours, he says, like this violence was always in your father.” She rests her elbows on the table and pulls back at her hair. “How do you fight back such imbeciles?”

  “Have you tried writing in all capital letters?”

  She looks at me and looks away, then closes the laptop. “That pleased little grin of yours is the same as your father’s, otherwise I’d smack you.” Then she stares off at nothing.

  I say hello and she snaps out of it.

  She says, “Do you remember my friend, Fay Wheeler?” I tell her I don’t and she says it doesn’t matter and starts into a story of Fay’s granddaughter, a girl named Caroline, who died when she was nine of a cardiac condition. Mr. Pickles visited Caroline in her final days, though Caroline was terrified of clowns.

  “Your Dad came into the room doing this dipping dosey-doe shuffle, tipping that top hat of his and smiling with his wacky face paint. But poor Caroline starts screaming and on a dime your Dad stops and does that same happy shuffle backwards, like he hit reverse. He didn’t break form and his smile didn’t wobble, but he knew he shouldn’t be there, that he wasn’t helping. I think others might have forced it, tried to prove something, the power of laughter or whatever. But for your Dad, it was never about him. It was always about the kids.”

  “Why do I feel like that was a lecture?”

  Mom gets up and when I go to help her she waves me off. “There’s a plate in the oven for you,” she says. “I’m gonna lie down.”

  “I’m trying to help. You, Dad, everything—I’m trying.”

  “You’re here, that’s true.”

  “Yes, I am. What else what you have me do?”

  She looks past me. “I really do need to lie down, honey.” As she makes her way to her bedroom she frowns as she glances out the kitchen window, where snow falls harder than before.

  “I’ll shovel before I eat,” I say. “We can’t have you falling again.”

  Walking away, she says, “Do what you do.”

  Mom gets a neighbourhood kid to clear her snow, so she doesn’t own much in the way of shovels, just an old rusty one that weighs as much as a sledgehammer.

  I’ll clear the front first. As I jimmy open the gate, edging away some snow that’s got it stuck, I see the taillights of a car stopped at the curb in front of Mom’s house. The car’s idling, the tailpipe pumping cloudy exhaust. Moving down the walk I see the driver’s door is open and can hear dinging coming from inside. The overhead light is on, but the driver’s seat is empty. A couple more crunching steps forward and I hear the crash of shattering glass.

  I stumble as I round the corner of the house. There’s a man in a green parka standing where the sidewalk meets Mom’s walkway and he and I make eye contact. He seems young and surprised to see me. He turns to run to his car and slips.

  Mom’s front window is broken and jagged. The boy gets to his feet and bolts for his car. As the recognition of what he’s done comes to me, so does the urge to hurt him.

  I huck the shovel at him. The blade clips him at the hip and he drops.

  When I get to him I grab the shovel. He’s trying to stand up and I cross-check him back down. When he turns over, he has a gloveless hand raised to me, protecting his face. It’s a face I recognize. It’s Dominic.

  We’re both breathing heavy. Dominic is holding his hip and sucking in air.

  I ask if he’s hurt. He looks up at me, then away. I say, “You’re alone.” Though I meant that as a question, it sounded like I was pointing out a menacing fact. “I mean, do your parents know you’re here?”

  He shakes his head no, for which he seems proud. The pain he’s trying to stifle seems to be worsening.

  Back through the broken window I see Mom in her housecoat.

  “I’m leaving in a few days,” I say to Dominic. “Do I need to worry about you?”

  “Fuck you,” he says, though he does so in a guttering way, on the verge of crying.

  I extend to him my hand to help him up. At first he doesn’t take it, but then he does and I help him. “How do I make this better?” I ask him. “Tell me how and I’ll do it?” His eyelashes are hardening into crystals.

  “You have no idea what you took from me.” He glances over my shoulder at the house.

  I give him a moment to get his nerves in check. “And this is what even looks like?”

  “This is the beginning.”

  “The beginning?” I check him again with the shovel. “Here.” I press the shovel into his chest and when he’s got hold of it I drop to my knees and pat my hand on my cheek. “Here, right here, this is where you wanna connect.” I lift my arms up at my sides and wait. He’s turning the shovel in his hands now, his grip harder, like maybe. “Do it! Do it like my dad did.” And I lower my head to him, giving him the whole of the back of my skull to crack. I can hear him breathe, heavier and heavier.

  The shovel falls into the snow. Dominic has made a break for his car, getting inside and slamming it into gear. But he’s not moving. The car’s stuck in a snowy rut.

  Mom’s in the window, clenching her housecoat at the neck. Dominic’s tires whiz and whir. Cranking the wheels one way, then another. Hammering it into reverse and lunging forward, but it’s no use.

  Mom calls my name and I tell her it’s okay, that she should go to her bedroom. Then I go to Dominic’s car and knock on the window. I make a cranking gesture and he slackens into his seat and lets off the gas. After another knock, he rolls down the window.

  “This didn’t go as planned, eh?”

  He’s breathing to the point of hyperventilating.

  I say, “This seems like the time a guy in my shoes should call the police.”

  He tries to muscle out the tough-guy phrase, “Go ahead,” but a pubescent squeak in his voice betrays him.

  “How about I give you a push?” Without forcing him to look me in the eye and concede, I walk to the back of the car and place my hands on the trunk.

  He’s watching me in the rear-view. The snow caught in his eyelashes is melting in the dashboard heat. I yell to him, “Promise you won’t jam it into reverse?” And in the rear-view I see it: I’ve made him laugh.

  An old blue tarp, duct-taped to the window, is what’s protecting us from the winter night.

  I’ve told Mom it was all an accident, that while shovelling the walk, I somehow lifted a chunk of brick and sent it flying though the window. And the car out front, well, just as I broke the window a car got stuck and needed help.

  “You have your father’s sense of priorities,” she says as she makes her way to bed. “And now it’s freezing in here.”

  I’ve made her some tea and brought it to her in the bedroom, where’s she seated on the edge of the bed, shivering. The furnace is struggling to keep up with the burst of cold. Mom asks me to get her some pain meds for her hands from the bathroom.

  “It’s a pharmacy in here.” There’s about a dozen pill bottles in neat, front-facing rows.

  “Nothing too strong,” she says. “Just Tylenol. Everything else makes me woozy.”

  “Why do you have Oxycontin?”

  “From when they yanked all my teeth.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Made me numb, and stupid. Why?”

 
; I twist open the pill-bottle lid. “Saw a program about kids crushing it up and snorting it.”

  “Idiots.”

  “Yup.” Then I say, “I’m going to use the washroom. Be right out.” I close the bathroom door and turn on the fan for some sound.

  There’s at least twenty white pills. I shake one out onto the sink, beside a mug with a faded Children’s Hospital logo, that smiling teddy bear in scrubs. With the mug’s flat bottom I crush the pill into as much of a powder as I can. Surprising how much powder a single pill crushes into. From the trash I take an old toilet paper roll, tear a strip, and roll it into—whatever it’s called—a nose straw. Takes a couple swipes to suck up all the powder.

  It doesn’t so much burn my nostril as it does flare it. And the taste of it down my throat is the same dusty, medicated taste as every powdery pill I’ve ever swallowed.

  Mom calls my name from the bedroom. I tell her I’ll be right out. After a mirror check to make sure I’m not all white-nosed, I flush the toilet and run the sink. When I’m out I bring her some Tylenol. “I can’t even hold this cup my hands hurt so bad,” she says. She takes the pills from me and drinks them down, holding the teacup with her stiff hands. Then she pops out her dentures and places them in a glass. It fizzes.

  “Let me help you into bed.” I tuck her under the covers.

  “It’s so damn cold,” she says, toothless and juicy.

  When I’ve got her tucked in I tell her I’ll stay with her, which she doesn’t protest. I turn off the light and crawl onto the bed beside her.

  As Mom asks me to hold her tighter, the Oxy kicks in. My arm is draped over her and my hand, holding her, feels like it’s blooming, expanding with an easy heaviness. The only sound is the tarp in the living room, billowing against the wind like a sail, and I can’t tell if my grip on my mother is loosening or tightening. Tightening or loosening. I snuggle closer. It’s like I’m bobbing atop the sheets, rocking along the softest cotton current. It’s wonderful. This is exactly it. The tarp on the window keeps whipping against the snowy night. I’m holding on and I’m floating away.

  Six Six Two Fifty

  David Huebert

  There’s a tap on my shoulder and Coach tells me I’m up. I ask who but he just nods out towards the ice where Scab Benoit’s lining up on the left wing. So I hop the boards, skate out into the crowd’s feral purr. Scab opens his busted picket fence mouth into a grin and wiggles his mitts as if we needed a signal to start what’s about to happen. Eyeing his teeth, I ask if he’ll get some implants with this year’s PIM bonus and he starts beaking faster than a ravenous seagull. Starts about my skating, saying I’m dragging my knees on the ice, saying I’ve got a stride like a lame jackrabbit, asking whether I need to borrow some tape for my ankles. I tell him to cool his jet stream, tell him to wait until Stripes drops the biscuit before he lets his hairy knuckles fly. Scab says something about the snatch of the sister I don’t have and the ref drops the puck and we’re tossing mitts and cocking elbows and squaring up in the bright white open.

  The arena a seashell, conjuring oceans. The strange hissing emptiness of twenty thousand screams.

  Scab keeps his fists close but I can see they’re yellow and bloated from his scrap last night in Buffalo. He’s taking his time so I unclip my helmet and toss it off. Then I tell him he’d be wise to keep his bucket on for this one. When he reaches for his chinstrap I clutch his sweater and wail, clap his jaw once, twice, glance his helmet on the third swing.

  The crowd whistling and shrieking and my heart pattering wild. That glow in my fist meaning pain later and strength now, and Scab still standing, breathing hard.

  “You’re a fuckin’ jizzrag,” Scab yells over the crowd and then he fakes one and lands one, opens the old wound above my left eye. Quicker than I remembered. Scab keeps hailing and hailing and it’s all I can do to grab his sweater and hold him off with a stiff-arm and thank fuck I have reach on him because my socket is fast filling with hot bright darkness.

  That stun ended by another: Scab’s fist clacking my chin. Half the world red and missing as Scab keeps hammering, the refs closing in to stop it. I tug him in and turn my face away and we both land a few more body shots and then I drop, yank him down to the ice, pull him close and hold him there.

  The sweet cool balm of the ice under me while the crowd howls above. Scab’s body curls into mine and the heave of our lungs gradually merges. We hold each other, breathing in synch. A drool of my blood leaks down onto the white of his sweater. The lovely warm clarity of it.

  “Good fight,” Scab pants, and I tell him same.

  I’m sitting at the bar with a beer and a bourbon and my right fist stuffed in a wine chiller, the ice melted into salty gazspacho. Three new stitches in the braid of scars along my left eyebrow and according to the team doctor I can’t fight for a month. Not fighting for a month meaning four weeks as a healthy scratch and the live possibility of getting traded or sent down to ride the bus.

  The place is dry even for a Tuesday and Sudsy and Moose have already ghosted home to their wives. Smithy and Taylor are the only others left and they keep stacking rounds of Petron in front of me, rounds of Petron I pour into the wine chiller when they’re not looking. Smithy and Taylor calling me a beauty, calling me Swamp Thang, saying how that scrap was so ferda and there’s nothing better than a man bleeding for his team.

  I know they mean it but I also know I’ll never score a pro goal and they’ll never fight on my behalf and I’ll likely retire with five career points and CTE. Two cup rings and zero recorded playoff minutes and I’d have to be pretty dull not to realize that I’m the guy who takes punches for the guys who score goals. That I’m a fighter on a team of hockey players.

  Smithy and Taylor tell me I’m a fuckin’ beautician and I nod and grin and dump another tequila into the chiller and find myself hunching over my phone, searching for Tinderella. Find myself turning into Mr. Swipes Right. I get a reply from a girl named Stacey who has a pug licking her neck in her profile pic which I guess is meant to show she’s got a sweet side. Stace tells me she’s tired of the bar scene and I tell her I’m tired of dominating the bar scene and she sends me a Noah’s ark of emoticons and then I’m popping a Cialis and climbing into my truck and heading for the Loop, city lights slurring through the dilute dark.

  Suiting up for practice Smithy and Taylor are asking me where I skedaddled to last night. “Slay the dragon Wessy?” “Hit the clinic this morning?” “The slipper fit?” It’s all chuckles and high fives as we head out towards the ice but then Coach pulls me aside and asks if I saw what Taylor was tweeting last night. Coach wiggles his rat-grey moustache, bald scalp glowing womb-pink under the rink lights, and asks if I saw my mug all over the Tribune website, a dozen empty shot glasses twinkling on the bar. I tell him no I didn’t see it but I can imagine and he says you better smarten up unless you want to head down to Rockford. Says he likes me and I’m a good dressing room guy but I’m a lot easier to replace than Smithy or Taylor and I tell him “yes coach” because I’m not eager to sell my house and move to the fifth new city in ten years.

  Coach doesn’t care that I played regular minutes for five years in div one, that I led my team’s defencemen in points two of those five years. Doesn’t care that I was the only student athlete at Penn State to graduate magna cum laude in kinesiology and he seriously doesn’t care that I anchored the power play on a Midget AAA team that won the New Brunswick provincial championship. Coach genuinely doesn’t know that I have a harder clapper than half our d-men, doesn’t care that I have an ex-wife and a little girl. Coach has won two cups in the past five years which means he is not obliged to care that most of the league is moving away from keeping pure fighters. To him I am a giant fist with skates on. Yes, Coach gives me the odd pity shift as a seventh defenceman when we’re up by a few but he still clearly thinks my only real skill is face punching. Thinks and is not scared to vocali
ze that there are plenty of guys in the league who will punch face without complaining or causing media shenanigans or asking for ice time.

  It gets hard thinking of yourself as a hockey player when you get one non-fighting shift every five or six games, which is why I like practise. Shooting pucks at pro goalies who know I can snipe my portion. I get a sweat going and gradually forget about Stacey and Coach and just get into the rhythm of active sticks and hard strides and crisp passes. Coach hollering his mantra: “It’s all about economy of motion.” Yelling “economy of motion” over and over until I start hearing it as a story about a girl named Connie Demotion, a girl I have to dig deeper and deeper to resist.

  What happened with Stacey was she mentioned something raunchy, something dark. Something I wasn’t expecting from a soft-faced nurse who’d admitted she’d been watching Gilmore Girls when I messaged her. I told her I don’t do this particular dark kink and asked why she didn’t mention this before I was in her living room with my bare feet on her zebra print rug. She said it wasn’t a big deal, said she was still up for whatever and then I saw this look in her eyes like Rebecca used to have when she wanted more from me but didn’t have it in her to ask. Then Stacey’s pug, Gorgonzola, came over and I started rubbing it around the neck and I guess the gorgon got really excited because his eyeball jumped out. His eyeball scooted straight out of its socket. Not like I saw the little tendrils connecting it to the brain or anything but it just sort of deked out in a way that was clearly not right, perched at the cusp of the skull like an orange held in a mouth.

  Stacey was not concerned. She said he’d had three surgeries and there was nothing she could really do so she leaned down and pulled his eyelids out and over the ball and then just popped it back in with her thumb. Which how could someone not find that hilarious? Stacey popping her pug’s eyeball straight back into its socket and the dog sitting there panting and snorting and breathing louder than a snoozing bear and all of it was too awful so I shot back on the couch laughing. Stacey got into it too and soon we were both cackling. Sitting there wheezing in a condo on the thirtieth floor, looking out over the river and the city lights, a belligerent hard-on going numb in my pants.