When did she stop coming with me to gather them?
Sitting in his basement now, Gerry finds time running together. He remembers the cartoons that advertised Dominion which Patricia favoured. He seems to remember that they featured the Duke and Duchess of Duckworth and the forger who painted the frescoes in Government House while he served his time. He thinks there may have been Johnnie Burke and Father Duffy and his holy well. However, he can’t remember if the cartoons ran when they first got to St. John’s or later on.
“India, India, India Beer, India that’s the brew,” Gerry hums. “India Beer’s the best there is and it’s all because of you!”
A few days later, Gerry is hiding out in a coffee shop again. It’s early afternoon. He worked an early morning shift and he’s in no great rush to go home. A police car pulls up outside. It’s the silly/cute little Pacer the Constabulary use for community relations, a little 1930s-looking car that always makes Gerry feel it escaped from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Two cops, a man and a woman in the utilitarian new black battledress uniform, feed the parking meter and head off down the street.
Gerry remembers cops from thirty years ago, when he was cutting his teeth as a court reporter.
The Newfoundland Constabulary weren’t “Royal” yet when he came to town, but their black delivery-van paddy wagons had a big crown flanked with an ER on the side. You’re not supposed to call paddy wagons “paddy wagons” now, Gerry reflects. You’re probably supposed to call them Celtic conveyances or something, but they were paddy wagons then. The back of the wagon was separated from the seats by a nautical-looking barricade of painted grey boards with a bright orange life-saving ring buoy hung on it. Two little foot plates were welded at the back of the van and a set of handles onto the roof so that two officers could ride outside like footmen on a coach or the Keystone Kops, waiting to be hurled off on a sharp turn. When the shifts changed, Gerry would watch the paddy wagons roll sedately and grandly up the hill to Fort Townsend, the cop shop, with a couple of constables standing on the foot plates.
For police grandeur, though, you couldn’t beat Inspector Jimmy Hayes coming down the hill. Gerry isn’t sure now if he remembers him, or imagines the sheer glorious anachronism of him on a sunny morning. He wore the belted tunic the Constabulary inherited from the Irish Constabulary, with black buttons with silver highlights and a short cape swinging. Square on his head was a cap that was a hymn of braid and polish and, in his gloved hand, an ebony and silver swagger stick. His boots were a heel-tap oratorio of black.
At the opposite end of the police fashion spectrum was Inspector Alphonsus Collins who shared the police prosecuting duties with Hayes. When Gerry started covering magistrates’ court in the 1970s, the police still did most of the prosecuting.
If Jimmy Hayes came down the hill like an Orange Lodge triumph, Gerry had no idea how Phonse Collins got to work at the court house. He suspected he slept in the walled-off prosecutors’ cubicle at the side of the court room. He looked like a giant toad swelling out of the blue-black uniform with the military, outside patch pockets. Leaning back in a swivel chair, looking at the world over the mound of his gut, he patted cigarette ash into his tunic, and Gerry, although he’s rationally convinced it didn’t happen, could swear he remembers Collins using the dangling tunic pockets as an ashtray, even popping glowing butts into them as the magistrate emerged from the panelled door behind the bench.
At Frankie’s bar, Gerry got lessons in Constabulary ancient history from a marinated giant of a former cop. Lately he writes about him as “Patrick Driscoll.” According to legend at Frankie’s bar, Driscoll got into an epic punch-up with Phonse Collins when they were new constables in the late ’30s. Collins had got the worst of it. He’d landed in hospital and complained, so Driscoll had left the force. He’d gone to sea for a bit, joined the heavy artillery during the war, and afterwards become a traveller for one of the old Water Street business houses until he retired.
Gerry heard his favourite cop story from Pat Driscoll as they drank Beck’s beer in Frankie’s bar. He has tried to sketch the scene for his writing group.
Fragment: Cops
“We were picked for big, not smart, you see,” Driscoll said. He was big and dark and beetle-browed and always wore a suit and tie and a good dark overcoat in winter. “There was this big young fellow and he found a dead horse on Waldegrave Street. He couldn’t spell Waldegrave in his notebook so he carried the horse ’round the corner onto George Street.”
The bar at Frankie’s would kindle into cop and court stories.
“There was this old fella, see, who used to get himself thrown in the pen every fall to get through the winter...” The audience pours its beer from the small bottles into the short tooth-glass tumblers that Frankie uses for both beer and drinks. “... Anyway, he chucked a rock through a store window down on Water Street and then he got worried that might not be enough to get him put away for the whole winter.”
In the diagonal afternoon sun of Frankie’s, the dust motes and smoke danced in anticipation of how the story would come out.
“I knows what comes next. I knows what comes next!”
“Anyway, the police bring the rock into court as Crown exhibit ‘A’ and the old fella pleads not guilty and challenges their evidence. He says he may have thrown a rock but he didn’t throw that rock.”
The storyteller became both magistrate and accused, his voice dividing into an imperial boom for one and a corner-boy crackie yap for the other.
“How big was your rock, man? Was it as big as my fist?”
“Bigger than that, Your Honour.”
“Bigger than my two fists?”
“Bigger than that, Your Honour.”
“As big as my head?”
“About as big as that, Your Honour, but not quite so thick.”
“Guilty! You are sentenced to six months in His Majesty’s Penitentiary! Next case!”
Somebody else has a story about a street character: Tommy Toe.
“There was buddy used to hang around with Tommy, see, and they were up in court for something and the judge asked Tommy where he lived, and he told him, ‘no fixed address.’Then the judge asks buddy where he lived.”
The bar would hang on the imagined question. Lips wet themselves with beer.
“I lives right alongside of Tommy.”
The answer completed the lunch hour liturgy and the drinkers would drain glasses and straggle down the hill back to work.
Gerry thinks of Patrick Driscoll during this year’s Christmas shopping. He has to go to a warehouse outlet in the industrial park out by the overpass to look for some kind of range hood that Vivian thinks they need. She said it could be their present to themselves. Gerry thinks half a range hood is a crummy present, but more and more often now, they find each other hard to buy gifts for.
Back when the railway track still ran through the scrubby spruce, Driscoll had a cabin there and a mistress who was not much older than Gerry was back then. Mistresses were officially a rarity in the working-class east-end. If they existed at all, they were more likely called “the lady friend” or “the girlfriend,” but Gerry always thought of Driscoll’s lover as a mistress. She and Driscoll had that kind of old-fashioned tang to them. Gerry remembers going to Driscoll’s cabin to meet her. He has added the scene to the on-going remembrances of George and Paula.
Fragment: Mistress at the Overpass
Driscoll drove them to the cabin in a large black car that moved like a battleship through lesser traffic. After dropping Mrs. Driscoll off at her bowling league, they made their stately way across town, out of the narrow street canyons of the east and out to the Breughel-landscape scrub around the overpass. There, they drove down snowy ruts among the rabbit tracks and rail sidings.
The mistress, whose name was Yvonne, arrived in her own small car. She was the widow of a man who had died in a hunting accident. She said she could never understand why he hunted because he didn’t like moose meat very much although
she did. Anyway, his buddy killed him, shooting blind, somewhere down around the Horse Chops.
The three of them drank Scotch through a late winter afternoon. Around Driscoll, Yvonne had the air of a guide at some historic monument. They had a full set of weights and a weight-lifting bench in the cabin. Driscoll lifted weights to keep fit and Yvonne had taken it up. They both took vitamin B from a huge plastic jar.
“Good for the liver,” Driscoll told George. “You can drink what you like if you eat right and take those.”
It was fully dark when George finally excused himself and left them alone. He had to give a cab very elaborate instructions for finding him in the overpass wilderness. Twice, corrections had to be telephoned to the taxi company and relayed by radio to the cab which had gone up the wrong dead-end lane.
Driving across the overpass, Gerry looks down and scans what’s left of the woods by the old railway right-of-way, trying to find a sign of the cabin or even the track that led to it.
He remembers that Patricia disapproved of the visit when he told her about it.
“The man’s married for God’s sake! Think of his wife!” She stopped short of saying something to Mrs. Driscoll. That would be too much tampering in Gerry’s supposed literary laboratory, a spoiling of his experiment. However, afterwards, she seemed to examine Gerry for symptoms of having affairs. Perhaps it was contagious. He realizes now that she was right. In a few years they both caught it, but he just caught affair sniffles from time to time. She got a terminal case and married somebody else. At the time, though, he just made a mental note that if adultery upset her, best not to tell her.
Words to live by, he thinks.
There’s no sign of Driscoll’s cabin now, or at least Gerry can’t find it. Neither can he get the range hood, or at least not by Christmas. The people at the warehouse know the one he means but it’s out of stock and they’re not even sure it’s made anymore. They say the people at the main store should have been able to tell him that.
A few years ago, Gerry read in the paper that his Patrick Driscoll had died. He hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years or more but he went to the funeral home. It was a soft spring night, one of the first warm ones of the year, and Gerry went up in the gathering dusk. He wore a blazer and a button-down shirt and tie with khakis and boat shoes. Once upon a time it would have been called irreverent but no one seems to change to go to funeral homes anymore.
Gerry’s “Yvonne” was the widow. The original wife had died years ago and she and Driscoll married. The children seemed to have accepted her, although some of them were her age. They stood around her protectively. Gerry knew some of the kids from the first marriage. There was one daughter who acts, and another, Siobhan, who took up public relations for some government department years ago. When he met her, Gerry had never seen “Siobhan” written as a name before and referred to her privately as Shaboom. Once he told her that at some office party and she thought it was cute. Now she greeted Gerry at the door. He introduced himself but found he didn’t need to.
“You’re still on the radio?”
“Until a grown-up job comes along, I guess. I’m still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.”
“Who says you have to grow up?” she asked. “He never did. Not so you’d notice anyhow.”
She inclined her head to the long casket where the slightly yellow face reposed, propped up a bit in the satin ruffles. Except that his eyes were closed, Driscoll looked like he was trying to see the TV without too much effort while lying on the couch. Gerry looked at the yellow face and wondered if the vitamin B kept working. In his head floated a line from his drinking days: I know my liver redeemeth.
Siobhan told him she was living in Toronto now, working at a public relations firm. She had to be close to sixty but she looked fit and tanned. Her fingernails were painted a smooth cocoa brown.
Gerry had to be introduced to Yvonne.
“We met at Pat’s cabin,” he told her when Siobhan took him over. They could have been sisters, one of whom had had a harder life. Yvonne seemed to have blended into the role of an old man’s wife.
“Oh my, the cabin...” she said. “That’s been torn down for years.”
It wasn’t a very sad wake. Driscoll was old and had been sick the last few years. Gerry was re-introduced to the other kids, all of them his age at least. There were two sons with Florida golfers’ tans. They seemed somehow impressed that Gerry could have drunk with their father and still be alive to tell the tale.
“Here’s a man who used to go down to Frankie’s place with Dad.”
“I remember him boasting about you the year you won some big golf tournament, a junior club championship?”
“God! That must have been what, ’73, ’74?”
Later, Gerry drove home with the window down for the first time that year. You could tell it was really spring. The dotted lines and arrows on the streets bloomed bright white in the headlights, repainted and vivid after fading to nothing in the winter’s salt. Visibility of street markings is becoming what Gerry has now learned to call “an issue” with him. On wet nights in late winter and early spring, he sometimes wonders what lane he’s driving in. Recalling the brightness of the lines that night, Gerry reflects that now they’re starting to fade again under this year’s December salt.
“Tempus certainly does fugit,” he says aloud.
four
DECEMBER 2003
Gerry is in the mall for his final rush of Christmas shopping. He has a strategy for mall-stalking in the last days before Christmas; catch it while it’s still asleep. He gets up in darkness and drives through the quiet streets where there are only a few luminously striped joggers. The ones he sees are the skinny Spandex variety with the bright glowing V’s that seem to point to the middle of their backsides. Is it supposed to focus attention on the fitness of the bum or give you a central aiming point? Gerry is an inconsistent jogger at best, and, when he does jog, he wears a pair of ancient Zellers sweatpants and an old sweatshirt. The black long-underwear look of this morning’s joggers isn’t for him. If you’re going out in tights you have to hark back to the Tudors, he thinks, although even they needed a sort of post-feudal ferocity to carry it off. Essex or Drake or some of Lady Jane Grey’s tribe could get away with it because they’d thunder into your courtyard and impale you on your own maypole over a slow fire. At the other end of the scale, Malvolio and Osric come down to us as fashion fools.
“A hit, a very palpable hit,” Gerry mutters, mowing down joggers in his imagination.
The parking lot is almost empty when Gerry pulls in. With no cars, you can appreciate its bald topography, actually rolling over a low rise in the middle so it sheds rain. The ploughs and salt crews have been out and you can see the painted stalls on bare pavement, although the hills all around are ghostly with light new snow on the trees. Gerry parks carefully between the painted lines in the centre of the empty lot. He points the front of the Honda out into the hypothetical traffic lane for a quick getaway in case the shoppers turn nasty.
“S-A-S parking,” Gerry says to himself. Years ago he bought the Special Air Service survival book and learned to avoid snakes like tai pans and bushmasters if they ever slithered into Newfoundland. He read up on how to boil the goldfish and drink the water as you tried to outlive the neighbours after nuclear Armageddon. So far the need hasn’t arisen. However, he parks, nose-out, for a quick getaway.
In the mall, he finds one coffee shop open earlier than the others. He carries a foam cup with him to the barber shop that is part of this morning’s plan. The barber opens at seven. A haircut and the morning papers will occupy him until Wal-Mart opens in an hour or so.
The barbershop is a transplant from downtown and is old-fashioned in a modern sort of way. According to framed clippings on the walls, when it started up in the ’50s it was ultra-modern. It had low, swivel easy chairs instead of high barber chairs. It gave the short back and sides haircuts, the Sal Mineo comb-backs and crews and
brush cuts that still grace framed photos on the walls. Some of the photos are advertising shots, showing what you can do with Wildroot Cream Oil or Brylcream. Others are sports teams, hockey and softball mostly, wearing narrow-lapel jackets and skinny ties with big clips that go past the width of the tie. Team members sport the haircuts in the pictures.
When Gerry first came to town he wouldn’t have gone to this barbershop. They were slow to get the hang of long hair. Besides, they were busy watching their sports teams grow up and move to the suburbs. By the time the long-haired had taken over the downtown sometime in the ’80s, the barber shop moved to the mall.
Gerry fancies he can recognize some of the ancient sports teams in the chairs in the barbershop yet. There are retired faces under haircuts that are renewed weekly, although they don’t need it. Gerry himself gets monthly haircuts. He started coming here in the ’90s, well after he’d begun keeping his hair shortish and after there had been a sort of convergence of styles. The barbershop has given long cuts for years now. Some disco-flavoured pictures of mullets and shags have even joined the ducktails and buzz-cuts on the wall. They all look about equally antiquated now.
Gerry gets his Christmas trim with the minimum of fuss. The conversation is morning, Christmas and minimal.
“Have you got your shopping done?”
“Just about, I should have it clewed up today.”
“You got your boat up for the winter, I guess?”
Gerry is not a sports follower so talking about his sailboat is his occasional key to some sorts of small talk. “Oh yes, got it up in October, Thanksgiving weekend.”
“The snow’s holding off a bit.”
“Just enough for a white Christmas would be okay with me.” One day in this barbershop, Gerry had a long chat with a man who was waiting for hospital results. He didn’t seem to expect them to be good.
“I’ve only just got enough hair again to need cutting,” he complained. “Now I’m going to have to start chemo again.”
Happiness of Fish Page 5