Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  It is an October day and Gerry is waiting for a bus in the early morning. The rain in the night has changed to mostly drizzle and fog, but with occasional hard showers, like parting shots in an ice-cold argument, sneaky, over-the-shoulder afterthoughts which sting if they don’t kill. The mist skirmishes through the spruce trees on the hill above Gerry’s neighbourhood, a guerrilla army of diagonal, wet ghosts, angling down the slope to invest the day.

  Gerry turns his back to the clammy drift and turns his raincoat collar up. He’s riding the bus today because the truck is in the shop for its umpty-seven-hundred-kilometre check-up. He has to go downtown and it’s too wet to walk all the way. He’s consulted the bus schedule he and Vivian keep stuck to the fridge for car-less emergencies. If they haven’t changed the schedule he should be able to ambush a bus without being out in the wet too long.

  As he waits under the dripping bus-stop sign, a string of ducks scrambles up the sky. Hitting it running, they hurtle up from the furtive muskrat stream that subverts the tameness of the neighbourhood. The stream lurks in the alders and reeds, stalking the tame horticulture of gardens and lawns. Gerry remembers the old Dorothy Parker tag on horticulture: You can lead a whore-to-culture, but you can’t make her think.

  The ducks gain frantic height. They cut through the wet grey over the morning traffic on the parkway. They level off and fly fast and straight over the oiled-looking shopping mall parking lot.

  There’s an asthmatic, diesel bulldog snuffling from a side street. The bus snorts around the corner and fusses damply to a halt at Gerry’s stop. The pneumatic doors give an iron-lung slurp and gather him in.

  The bus pulls away, a window-steamy rolling community. Cheek-by-jowl, its residents are morning loud or quiet, depending on their natures. Gerry is quiet. He digs in an inside pocket for his notebook and pen. He looks out and sees a crow on a wet post and thinks of the rhyme for magpies and crows. One for sadness, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy.

  Gerry reflects that you don’t often see just one crow. He suspects the old rhyme-maker was hedging his bets. He’d have been more likely to see two crows or magpies or ravens or whatever. He’d be more likely to get “two for joy” because crows are social.

  Maybe the old rhymester wanted a son who wouldn’t cost him a dowry, Gerry jots. Maybe he wanted somebody to help out with the heavy work around the small-holding. Four crows are probably just as likely as three, maybe even more likely. Make it three for a girl and four for a boy. From a peasant perspective, the deck of crows is stacked for optimism, but can there be too many crows for luck?

  Gerry remembers his father’s stories of the First World War. He said he’d seen the sky black with crows after Passchendaele. They flew in from all over Flanders to gorge on the dead. What would the old peasant make of that in his couplet, assuming a passing army didn’t loot or shell him out of his contemplation?

  Four million crows for Armageddon, Gerry writes.

  The bus turns another corner. On the Kiwanis ball field is another crow. This one is on the ground with a flock of seagulls. They’re eating the suicidal autumn worms the rain has driven up into the cold.

  Do crows, separated by a couple of minutes of bus ride and mixed with gulls, count as “two for joy”? Do gulls count?

  The bus goes on through the fog as Gerry tries to do the math.

  The woman sitting next to him has a newspaper open to the local arts section. The paper flops into his line of sight. He sees a picture of someone he knows. It’s Nish from his writing workshop.

  “Coastal boat steward serves up salty treat,” the headline reads. “This Bucket Here, a must-read!”

  But I’ve got the crows counted, Gerry thinks. Right here in this notebook.

  fourteen

  NOVEMBER 2004

  It’s not quite four on a Friday morning and Gerry stands at his kitchen counter, drinking coffee with his raincoat on, staring out the window. He’s waiting for a taxi to take him to the airport, and his old folding suitcase and shoulder bag are slumped together by the door, like old dogs waiting patiently for a walk. Only the reading lamp on the small desk in the kitchen is turned on. Its downward glow makes the kitchen shadowed and cozy.

  He hears the bedroom door open down the hall. Then the bathroom door shuts. A minute later the toilet flushes. Vivian shuffles into the kitchen in flannel pyjamas with snowmen on them. They were a gift from Melanie, picked out by Diana, last Christmas.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No, I never heard you. I just got up to go. You’re all ready then?”

  “Cab’s on his way, or says he is.”

  “Call me when you know how your mother is. Did you take that calling card we had on the boat? It’s good for a couple more months.”

  “I did. Right here. You’d better go back to bed.” Gerry hugs Vivian. She seems shorter, barefoot and smaller, as if she was slightly compacted for sleep and has not completely unfolded.

  “Call me,” she says and shuffles back along the hall.

  After supper the night before, they had said they meant to go to bed together, but they didn’t. Gerry had turned in early because he has an early flight. Vivian had a house-showing that ran late. Gerry knows the feel of the snowman pyjamas and now wants to run his hands under them but it’s too late. The cab is called. Car lights flash on the kitchen window. He picks up his bags and lets himself out the kitchen door, locking it behind him.

  There’s been frost. The steps are slippery under his desert boots. The grass of the lawn is glazed under the street lamps and feels like frozen vegetables when he pauses, humping his bags down the driveway, and tests it with his foot. He throws the bags in the back seat of the cab and climbs in beside the driver.

  “Airport, please.”

  On the ride through the empty streets he reviews what is happening. The retirement home in Ottawa has called. His mother had a fall.

  “She must have got up in the night. One of the girls found her on the bathroom floor.”

  There had been a trip to hospital and X-rays. Now there’s apparently a broken arm and pneumonia. She isn’t eating. She’s been sent to hospital.

  The night before, Gerry had spoken to a doctor who sounded about fifteen.

  “She’s not eating and she’s very disoriented and she’s a bit dehydrated. I think we may be looking at tube feeding. For the moment we’re just giving her electrolytes and something for the pain.”

  “I’ve got a ticket bought,” Gerry had said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Business or pleasure?” the cab driver asks, breaking in on him.

  “Family,” Gerry says. None of the above.

  Gerry balances a Hortons coffee through security, shoving his corduroy jacket, raincoat and shoulder bag through the scanning machine. He took the trouble to empty his pockets of pennies before he left home. He manages not to swamp the change and key tray as he often does and goes by the sweeping wands virtually beep-less.

  In the departure lounge little tribes form around the various gates. At his, he runs into Kayla, the girl who did the voice report on the car crash back in the summer. She’s been moved from a regional station into St. John’s.

  “Good morning, Kayla. Where are you off to?”

  “Oh hi, Gerry. Toronto. They’re sending me on the radio skills course.”

  She wears jeans and a sweater and a short suede coat. She has a Kool-Aid orange streak in her short hair and carries a tiny knapsack. Gerry is reminded of the teddy bear and puppy knapsacks that were in vogue a few years back. Tanya had a floppy-eared beagle.

  “That’s a good course,” Gerry says. “Someday, I ought to take it and acquire a few radio skills myself. There’ve been a few changes since I started with carrier pigeons.”

  She realizes he’s joking and guffaws. It’s gratifying. She has a nice big laugh, unaffected. It’s a nice balance to her serious workplace manner.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Ottawa. My mom’s not v
ery well. She’s ninety-six.”

  “Wow! That’s too bad.”

  “Well, she’s a pretty old lady. You’ve got to expect...”

  Gerry wonders what ninety-six means to Kayla: A bargain-price for a pair of sneakers, or a number of beer bottles in a kid’s song, or do they even sing the beer-bottle song anymore?

  Gerry thinks of the headache commercial with the singing kids and the woman in the car. It is the song that has no end. It goes on and on my friend...

  Once he web-searched “Song That Has No End” on the computer and found that Shari Lewis wrote it. Shari Lewis has been dead for half a dozen years. Gerry remembers her and her puppets on Ed Sullivan a billion years ago.

  Their flight is called. Kayla and Gerry walk together through the zigzag accordion walkway and board the plane. “I change in Halifax,” she says, tossing her little knapsack into the bin. Her seat’s far ahead of his.

  “See you when we get back.”

  Gerry goes to his own seat and for most of the flight snoozes or looks at the daylight growing stronger as they fly west, a milk-run, delivering the morning.

  Inland weather always comes as a bit of a surprise to Gerry now. He’s lived beside the ocean too long. The apparent stability of a bright, late fall day in Ontario catches him off guard as he drives to the hospital. The sky seems curiously empty and static.

  If the sky is empty, the parking lot is not. Gerry gets a reminder he’s not on his home turf where he knows the best hidden parking places. The lot is full and two lanky Somalis tell him to just leave his car in the middle of the lot’s traffic lane, blocking at least two cars into their spots, and leave the keys with them.

  The Somalis are swaddled in marshmallow-pile jackets and fake-fur bomber hats although there’s only a degree or two of frost.

  “Nobody is going to steal your car, mister,” the shorter of the two tells Gerry. He has an aquiline face with a spatter of pock marks on his cheekbones. He seems to be senior in the hierarchy of the parking lot. “Just leave your keys here on this board, with a tag on them.”

  Gerry hesitates for a moment and then thinks, Hick! Why should you care if some secret organization of Somalis decides to take your rent-a-car for a drive, show your luggage the sights?

  The board is full of keys with tags. All sorts of cars are blocking off all sorts of other cars. The system apparently works. He leaves the rental agency keys, with their unfamiliar electric door-opener-cum-horn-blower attached, and walks away, feeling strangely conscious of not having their weight in his pocket.

  His early morning flight has brought him here too early for regular visiting hours. When Gerry goes to the floor his mother is on, it is in its full mid-morning internal routine. People in pastel uniforms push high-tech floor cleaners around the halls. Posses of doctors and medical students roam the wards. Because Gerry has come so far, the nurses at the nursing station tell him he can look in on his mother.

  She is asleep when he goes to the room. She looks small. Her head is thrown back on the pillow, and under a clear plastic oxygen mask, her mouth, with her dentures out, is open. With her eyes tight shut she looks like she’s breathing for a sprint in slow motion. Her breathing gurgles. Her injured arm is in a plastic sleeve, like an elongated archer’s wrist brace with Velcro straps. It strikes Gerry that plaster casts seem to have gone out of fashion. He touches her hand but she does not wake.

  There are two other women in the room. One moans softly but persistently. Two nurses come in and rattle a curtain around her bed. Inside it, they begin some procedure that makes the moaning louder. When they finish, Gerry sits and holds his mother’s hand for a bit. Then he goes downstairs for something to eat. The airlines don’t feed you breakfast any more. On his way past the nursing station, a podgy man in a mauve sweater over green scrubs tells him that the real visiting hours start at one.

  The hospital is old with wedding-cake pillars and stone railings, but the cafeteria is in a newer section, big and modern. It seems to be driven into an angle of the old building like some mountaineer’s wedge, made of space-age material forced into the ancient rock. It is big and busy and timeless. People order whatever meal is appropriate to where they are in their staggered days. Gerry buys bacon and eggs but walks past an iced counter of sushi in plastic containers. Sushi has been in the supermarkets of St. John’s for only a year or two. Gerry is impressed that, here, you can buy it in a hospital canteen. The coffee comes in a California confusion of canisters, flavours and levels of caffeine, but when Gerry tracks down French Blend among the hazelnut and vanilla oddities, it’s tasty. He takes his breakfast to one end of a long table. A clutch of hospital workers are taking their break at the other end. They’re rehashing a reality TV show that was on the night before. Outside a plate-glass wall are little round, street café tables, bolted to a patio. The chairs have been removed in preparation for winter. As Gerry finishes his coffee, a man with a gas-powered leaf-blower chases leaves into lines among the tables. His partner rakes them into plastic bags. The blower makes a cocky, outboard-motor sound. The men’s breath makes clouds in the bright November air. Cramped from his plane ride and the unnatural stillness of sitting in his mother’s room, Gerry decides he needs to be outside.

  Across six lanes of traffic, in front of the hospital, is the old federal experimental farm. Now the experimental plots and the animals have been mostly moved to other research facilities, but years ago, when he was in university, Gerry worked there. He strides down the hospital walk, past the flowerbeds winterized with evergreen branches, and punches the buttons on the traffic light at the road crossing. The farm is mostly greenbelt parkland now. There are few fences. In a minute he’s hiking over slightly frosty fields.

  Gerry figures that at some point in the centennial summer of 1967, he probably hoed this field. Before the war, his parents had worked at the farm. His mother had spoken to someone she used to know and Gerry had got a summer job as a labourer at the plant research division. Now he walks briskly but aimlessly across the crisp fields, swinging his arms to shake out the kinks. Fields away, traffic growls around the edges of the farm, a distant accompaniment to the crunch of his feet on frosty turf.

  In early afternoon, Gerry is back on the ward at the hospital. His mother is awake but doesn’t seem to know him. The top of her hospital gown is stained with the spatters of an attempt to feed her, and she tosses and feebly fights the mask, the saline drip in the back of one hand and the weight of the plastic on her arm. A nurse comes and gives her an injection and she lapses into quiet with only occasional moans and whimpers. Gerry sits and holds her hand.

  Later that afternoon, a blonde woman in slacks and a shaggy sweater of earth tones comes to the door and gestures him into the hall.

  “Mr. Adamson?”

  “Yes, that’s me.” Gerry does his helpful big kid impression. “I just got in this morning.”

  “I’m Rosalind Fife, hospital social services,” she says and presents a card. She is about Gerry’s and Vivian’s age and, like Vivian, looks like she works out and takes care of herself. Her only concession seems to be her feet. Her shoes are smooth walnut leather and look expensive, but they are one of those shapes that grew out of Earth Shoes and clogs thirty years ago. They have a width and bluntness that is, somehow, slightly clownish, Hobbit chic or shoes for a fat cartoon animal. Still, she’s pleasant and confiding, and sitting in a corner of a ward waiting room, Gerry finds he’s quite happy to have her to talk to.

  “She seems pretty out-of-it,” he says. “If she doesn’t get better than that, I don’t know about her care. She’s in Laurier Lodge at the moment. We live out of town, Newfoundland.”

  “There is long-term care available,” Rosalind Fife says. “We went to Newfoundland in 1997, the Cabot anniversary.”

  They talk about nursing care and visiting workers and what’s available at Laurier Lodge. They agree to meet at her office on Monday and go into more detail. They shake hands and she walks silently away in her stylish/comfo
rtable Wally Walrus shoes.

  As the evening starts to draw in, Gerry meets his mother’s doctor. On the telephone the night before, Gerry had thought the man’s name sounded like “Oompah.” It turns out to be Huta.

  And he’s not fifteen, Gerry thinks. He’s sixteen if he’s a day.

  As well as being young, Dr. Huta is slight, deep-eyed and sandy-haired. He wears an Oxford-cloth shirt and khaki pants. He has a stethoscope around his neck and a Velcro pouch for some other equipment on his belt.

  If you’re not careful, you’ll grow up to look like me on holiday, Gerry thinks. Still, Dr. Huta is sensible and practical.

  “She’s not eating,” he tells Gerry. “She hasn’t got much strength to fight the pneumonia. Her lungs don’t sound good. I think we ought to tube-feed her and see if we can get her strength back.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “I’m not very happy with the pneumonia. She is quite old. Do you know what her wishes might be? Is there any sort of living will?”

  This is for real, Gerry thinks. The false alarms and dry runs are over.

  “There is, and I’ve heard her talk about it, but her lawyer has it. As far as I recall, it’s just to keep her comfortable and not prolong things if she’s not going to get better.”

  “No heroic measures,” Dr. Huta says. “That’s the normal thing.”

  Gerry feels anything but heroic. He wonders if he’s coming across as ghoulish, bloodthirsty: Can’t wait to get the old lady out of the way. He must call his buddy, Bob the Lawyer, and see what the living will actually does say.

  “So if it’s okay with you, we’ll put the tube in now and start feeding her,” Dr. Huta says. “But I probably should mention that if she’s going, some people find it harder to ask us to stop a procedure than it is to just not start it.”

  “So you think she’s going?”

  “Not right away and the feeding may make all the difference. I would say we’ll know better after the weekend.”