Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  He’s one of us, Gerry thinks. One of the people with a built-in diminutive.

  When Gerry first went to AA, Johnny had a year in. He got a medallion at the second or third meeting Gerry was at. Since then his luck hasn’t been good. He has a collection of three-month medallions and probably a dozen years of sobriety in total, but he can’t seem to string it together. It’s made him bitter, although he keeps coming around.

  “I haven’t seen you around,” Johnny says,

  “I’ve been busy. No rest for the wicked,” Gerry says. He’s aware of his equivocal reasons for being here tonight. He suspects that Johnny hopes he’s been out, that his world’s a mess. Then he could regain some of that magic time he had when he had a year’s sober ascendancy and Gerry thought a day without a drink was magic that only wizards could do.

  “I’m suing those bastards where I used to work,” Johnny tells Gerry. Gerry recalls that he had some sort of tangled unfair dismissal case that had dragged on for several years. Building scrap had gone astray. No charges were brought but Johnny got fired. He claimed his union hadn’t taken his part. At one point, when Gerry was trying to be a keen reporter, they had talked about him doing something on the story. However, the union and Johnny’s sometime lawyer had both shied away. They stopped just short of saying that he’d got himself fired and that was all there was to it.

  “It’s a big fucking swindle, you know. Honest-to-God, sometimes I think you’d be better just going out to Red Cliff and jumping over.”

  Or wait until the blood donor people send you a letter with a surprise in it, Gerry thinks, remembering his own reminder of mortality. Be careful what you wish for.

  Gerry has never been able to find pat answers for people who talk about killing themselves. It’s not something he considers for himself any more. He’s not sure that he ever did, but he used to threaten. Once, in an empty house, he had stretched a toe to the trigger of a shotgun, a morbid rehearsal. Despite the fact he knew the gun was empty, it took every muscle straining to make the trigger click. He’d decided that the drunk’s slower suicide was better suited to his more cowardly, lazier style.

  Gerry knows he’s a disappointment to Johnny. He wants the church-conditioned response: “You can’t. You mustn’t.” Gerry is afraid he’s a bit more pragmatic than that. It’s more a question of how much pain, or prospect of pain, you can take. It’s like taking aspirin. Some people resist medication and do acetylsalicylic martyrdoms. Others pop a pill at the first twinge. Who’s right?

  People who talk about suicide get on Gerry’s nerves a bit. They want him to be responsible for their life or death, to be their advocate in the capital case they’re trying in their heads. Gerry suspects they would not be happy to be told to look at how they fit into the world and then do what they think best.

  The meeting finally gets started.

  “God grant me the serenity...”

  Gerry looks out the window at the thickening dusk. The meeting is in an upstairs room so he’s looking at a skyline. The trees are plump, frozen explosions of dark green against his horizon. He remembers summer dusks in early childhood, when the trees in the backyard seemed to draw closer to his bedroom windows as the sky purpled and the murmur of grown-up voices on the lawn swing replaced the last roulette-wheel whirr of the hand-pushed lawn mower.

  A few late gulls flap purposefully across his patch of window. A droning small plane, its lights already gem-bright, bumbles across the sunset to get down before dark.

  Gerry declines to speak tonight.

  “No thanks. It’s great to be here, but I’m just going to listen tonight.”

  The deepening evening quiets him.

  On his walk home he picks up chocolate ice cream drumsticks. Vivian is home when he gets there. They sit on the steps of their backyard deck and eat the dripping waffle trumpets in what is still a warm darkness.

  According to the sun, it is just past mid-summer when Gerry and Vivian have Philip around for his farewell dinner. Gerry has never found mid-summer works very well in large parts of Canada, in Newfoundland in particular. The days may be long but the water is still cold and the fog can lie in. It’s not as warm as it’s going to be yet.

  “What is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days,” Gerry recites from a ’50s memory work assignment. “There ought to be a scale of correction for where you are. Add one month for mainland Canada. Add two for St. John’s.”

  Despite Gerry’s grumbling, it is a pleasant summer evening. He has picked up Philip and his luggage and brought him home. He’s not working this week. Summer relief work will start in earnest in a week or so with the July 1st weekend. Vivian is working until almost six so Gerry has been cooking, pork tenderloin and roast potatoes. Vivian will buy a trifle for dessert on her way home. Philip sits at the kitchen table with a large glass of white wine. Gerry is fussing with salad makings.

  “I’m going to miss dinners here,” Philip says. “I like your family.”

  “That’s because you only come a couple of times a year. We’d wear a bit thin if you spent more time with us.”

  Gerry is feeling petulant because Darren has been in touch from Alberta.

  “He misses Melanie and Diana,” Vivian had told Gerry earlier that week. “He wants to come home.”

  “Jesus, he’s like the cat, “Gerry said. “When he’s in, he wants out. When he’s out, he wants back in.”

  “He called them the other night,” Vivian said. “He really misses them. He’s stopped playing the machines.”

  “His sister’s smart enough not to let him near the till.”

  “I told Melanie I’d pay for a ticket. I put it on Visa.”

  “You were the woman who wanted the little weasel dismembered a couple of months ago.”

  “He wants to come home. Diana’s all excited.”

  “We could buy her a pony cheaper and she’d still be excited. We’d only have to feed that,” Gerry had said.

  “I keep telling you your family is pretty normal,” Philip says now. “They get on top of you,” Gerry says. “The other day I was in the liquor store and they were giving out ugly cloth smiley faces or some damn thing for Father’s Day. The girl asked me if I was a dad. I said no without thinking. I think I meant it.”

  Vivian rolls in with the trifle. Gerry pours her a wine and himself a soda water. They sit down to dinner.

  “I hear your son-in-law is coming home,” Philip says.

  “Yes, we’ll see how that goes.”

  “He’s probably quite worried about coming back. I know I’m wondering if I’m doing the right thing going back to Ontario.”

  “Well, I’m sure you miss the place,” Vivian says.

  “No, actually I dread the thought of going back. Toronto has changed from the city I grew up in,” Philip says. “I like the size of things here but I’m afraid I’ll never move. It’s addictive.”

  “What’s your point, caller?” Gerry asks. “I just dropped in for the weekend thirty years ago.”

  After dinner Vivian clears away, putting plates in the dishwasher.

  “You boys cooked,” she says. “I’ll clean up.”

  “I’d hardly say I contributed anything,” Philip says. “I just sat around and watched your husband.”

  “That’s what made it art,” Gerry says. “You were the audience.”

  After dinner Gerry and Philip go for a walk. One of the things Gerry likes about their neighbourhood is that the country intrudes into the town and comes up against it. On a summer night, a wooded hillside looms over the end of their street and it’s possible to imagine you’re in a more rural and a smaller place. A conservation group has run a network of trails close to his and Vivian’s house. Gerry liked the hillside better when the trails were old ones and less frequented by joggers and up-market dogs, but there are still good walks to be had.

  Gerry and Philip climb on a gravelled path through moss-hung fir.

  “Snotty var,” Gerry says.

&nbs
p; “That’s it, is it?” Philip asks. “I’ve heard the term. Var just means fir, I guess.”

  “It’s var and it’s snotty all right,” Gerry says.

  The path switchbacks up through the trees, with pressure-treated wooden steps up the steep bits. The woods smell like a mouldy apothecary shop.

  “Vivian runs up this,” Gerry says. “There are five hundred and some steps,”

  “I’ll take her word for it.”

  The evening is warm and they’re both short of breath and sweating when they come out into a clearing on top of the hill. The town is spread out below them. At their feet are a brook, some ponds, the parkway and Gerry’s subdivision. His Honda is visible, parked in the street, a sesame seed in the tree-and-pavement salad of the neighbourhood.

  South and east, the older parts of town hold the ridges. The Basilica and the new art gallery stick up and bite into the belly of the sky. Beyond them, the Southside Hills and Signal Hill rear up, as high as where they’re standing now. Beyond that is the sea, like silver paper now in the flat light. Far off, the fog lurks, waiting to come to land with the evening’s cool.

  “I’m going to miss this place,” Philip says.

  “I know,” Gerry tells him. “I go to Ontario now and the ocean is missing. Even if I don’t go near it for days at a time, I want it around.”

  They walk home down a road that still has an outpost of country in the city. A tiny pasture and a cow barn occupy a rural island in the subdivisions that climb the slopes of the hill.

  “I do like the smell of cows,” Gerry says.

  “It’s an acquired taste, I guess.”

  “An affinity for bullshit is no bad thing for a journalist.”

  When they get back to the house, Vivian has finished the dishes. She’s on the phone to some client or other. Gerry gets Philip a beer and makes himself a coffee and they sit on the back deck. When Viv finishes her call she brings a beer and joins them.

  Gerry has given some thought to a going-away present for Philip.

  He’s settled on a tiny collection of Whitman poems. They were part of an anniversary set that Penguin put out a dozen years or so ago.

  “I have said that the soul is not more than the body,/And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,/And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,” Gerry reads. “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud...”

  “That’s beautiful,” Viv says.

  “That’s some barbaric yawp,” Philip says. “Thank you, Gerry.”

  Trees overhang, and alders enclose the darkening yard. Beyond their leaves, the traffic whooshes by, tires sibilant. They watch the night fall and then go to bed. Philip has booked a bargain flight that leaves before five in the morning. Gerry sets double alarm clocks, the way he does to go to an early shift at work.

  Gerry phases his alarms. First there is a little battery-powered travelling clock that makes a monotonous bird-like piping, an idiot nestling calling insistently to be fed. The back-up is the clock radio set to “alarm” with its chainsaw buzz, but this morning the idiot chick is enough. Gerry reaches out and stifles it before Viv has a chance to do more than roll over and mutter in her sleep.

  Philip, it appears, hasn’t slept. Gerry raps on his door as he goes down the hall to the kitchen to put on coffee. There’s already a line of light from under the door.

  “I got interested in some of your books,” Philip explains as they drink the coffee at the kitchen table. “Then it got to two-thirty or so and there just didn’t seem to be much point to going to sleep. I’ll sleep on the plane.”

  The fog that was offshore when they took their walk the evening before is on the land now as they load Philip’s stuff aboard Gerry’s wagon and set out for the airport. The headlights make long, narrow white cones in the mist. There is virtually no traffic. They’re more than halfway to the airport when a taxi passes them, heading the same way. A few others join the convoy as they make their way along the main road to the airport.

  The car radio is politely murmuring the latest news from sub-Saharan Africa on one of the overseas broadcasts the CBC runs late at night. Two announcers, one with an Afrikaans voice, the other, Oxbridge-African, are talking about Zimbabwe. Gerry flashes to an early apartment with Patricia. It was the time of the Rhodesia war. They used to listen to Barbara Frum on the radio, talking on the phone to white Rhodesians in a bar. The Rhodesians would talk and Gerry and Patricia would cook and eat their supper. Gerry was a local current affairs producer then. They always listened to As It Happens and Sunday Morning. They hoped that national radio might be contagious.

  The airport looks like the final scene of Casablanca. The lights are ringed in haze. Water jewels the chain-link fences. The planes poke into the terminal like shiny, dark piglets around an aluminium and glass sow. However, the mist is growing greyer. Somewhere the sun is trying to come up.

  Gerry helps Philip carry his bags into the terminal. The TV screens say that his flight is scheduled to depart on time.

  “They can take off into it,” Gerry observes. “It’s landing they’re not fussy about.”

  “You don’t need to wait around,” Philip says. “I’ll check in and just wait for my flight.”

  They shake hands. “Give my best to Ontario.”

  “Don’t run into anything with the boat.” The sky is lighter still when Gerry goes outside to the parking lot. Philip will get away just fine. Driving away from the airport, he turns away from town and drives in a wide loop through some of the communities on the outskirts of St. John’s. Sometimes he drives on winding roads by the sea. Then he drives through wooded roads where suburbs are just starting to take hold. In one of the new suburbs he spots a tall figure farther down the road. It stands in the middle of the lane he’s in. It grows improbably tall as he nears it. It seems to want to block his passage. Gerry slows down. As he nears it, the gawky shape resolves itself into a moose. It looks at him as he stops in the road. The big ears semaphore. The new bungalows along the road look on with blind windows. Gerry taps the horn, a short Bronx cheer of a beep. The moose startles sideways slightly, offended more than frightened. It clacks up somebody’s newly paved driveway, walks through a breezeway and disappears across a newly sodded backyard. The big hooves cut up the new sod.

  “Go moose,” Gerry says and continues his drive. The fog is burning off. The radio plays the national anthem and the “Ode to Newfoundland” and resumes local broadcasting. The weather report says it will be a sunny day.

  twelve

  AUGUST 2004

  The theme for the mid-day news gallops from the speakers around the radio station. Gerry’s work for another day of early-morning shift is ending. He listens to hear the voice report he just recorded over the telephone. Like him, the reporter who did the report is a summer relief, but a brand new summer relief. She was sent to a spectacular road crash that has blocked the Trans-Canada Highway. Something had caught fire and somebody was dead and somebody else had to be cut out of a wreck with the “Jaws of Life.” Gerry has never cared for the term. He supposes somebody was being clever with “Charge of the Light Brigade.” “Into the jaws of death...” On the other hand he’s never been able to come up with a handy shorthand for the big power scissors that cut the tops and doors off crushed cars. “Hydraulic shears” doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue. Still, Gerry says that “Jaws of Life” sounds like a porn title.

  “It’s the sequel to Deep Throat,” he says. “Or maybe a soap opera about orthodontists.”

  The reporter’s name is Kayla and she has had a hard morning. She’d been sick in the ditch once and made a lot of false starts and stops in her report. Gerry had to edit them out. He finished just in time for the news. He hopes he got them all. He didn’t have time to play the piece through.

  “No sweat,” he’d told her. “You’re good down to there. Just take a breath and start again. I’m still rolling here.”

  He remembers when
he and Patricia were in Labrador and he did a lot of military flying stories. He remembers being flown in a helicopter to look at a ring of sheared trees and a sandy crater in the bush. The ground still stank of burning and jet fuel. It seemed to Gerry that there was no wreckage bigger than the burned wheels of the undercarriage. The RAF pilot had been a cheerful kid from somewhere in Scotland. His name was Duncan. They’d met him at a mess do a couple of nights before. He wanted to meet Canadian girls and urged Patricia to bring some of the other teachers to a toga party his squadron was planning.

  “It’ll be magic,” he said. “Like Animal House. To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!”

  Duncan had tapped wings with somebody else. The other pilot wrestled his plane back towards the base and ejected. He came down just outside the perimeter fence. Duncan had apparently spun straight down. If he tried to eject, it hadn’t worked.

  To-ga, to-ga, Gerry thinks and flops back and bounces in an ergonomic swivel chair that is adjusted for somebody else. The girl’s report is fine. The strain in her voice makes it real. He shuts down his computer, collects his thermos bottle and waves to the day shift, just halfway through their day. He takes his sailing ball-cap from the top of the computer, steals one of the office Globe and Mails and heads down the stairs to the summer street.

  It’s a Friday and Gerry has no particular place to go. Vivian has gone to Gander to visit her mother and one of her sisters. She had hardly stirred when he left the house at four this morning to go to work. He wonders if the accident on the highway will affect her trip. It shouldn’t. It’s beyond Gander but Vivian is cautious on the highway. She could have heard the early reports of the accident and taken it as an omen and cancelled her visit. Gerry hopes she hasn’t done that. He feels anti-social or at least hungry for a bit of solitude. He heads for home to see if she’s left.

  The last several weeks have been full of Darren and Melanie. Darren came home and moved back in with Melanie. Vivian and Gerry have taken Diana for a couple of weekends while they get re-acquainted.