Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  “Some people Gerry works with.” Vivian smiles at him, a bit forlornly.

  And there he was gone, he thinks.

  Gerry drives into the morning, not knowing where he is going. He stops at a Tim Hortons and fills the big insulated aluminium mug the garage gave him for servicing the Honda there. Normally Gerry has no trouble wasting time in coffee shops, but today he wants to be moving. He climbs back into his SUV and sets the mug in the holder. He’ll run on just the smell of coffee.

  He pulls up at the parkway, bustling with commuter traffic. The in-town lanes rush back towards his neighbourhood. The out-bound veer away south to skirt the hills which have a dusting of new snow.

  His coffee suspended within reach beside the instrument panel, Gerry is reminded of the days when the space race was news. There would be pictures and TV shots of the astronauts in their fitted couches in their capsules. They were plugged into their tiny environments, working where they slept.

  “This is Major Tom to Ground Control,” Gerry sings and turns into the out-of-town lane. The vehicle is warm and he feels a part of it. He remembers somebody telling him that the downside of being an astronaut was that they lived in diapers inside their space suits. The space toilet didn’t arrive until later.

  Cruising into infinity in Pampers, Gerry thinks. This too may come. South of the last bypass, the traffic thins out and Gerry is following the winding two lanes of The Irish Loop. The shamrocks on the signs tell him so. He remembers covering the fuss when the signs first went up. The designer had put four-leaf clovers on them instead of shamrocks. It cost some ungodly amount to get them all redone.

  The sea is close on his left-hand side and there is little snow here, this early in the winter. He rolls past spruce that all lean one way from the sea winds and dips into communities of candy-bright houses and hauled-up boats, turned into still life by the winter.

  It’s the kind of driving you can do unconsciously, a steady hundred K with enough steering to keep the eyes and body from getting bored. The head can be where it likes.

  Gerry wonders where he’s going and when he’s returning.

  If I’m returning floats just out of reach in the back of his mind. He thinks back to last night’s “You’re not a bad man.” Vivian and Patricia have both said this. Is it an absolution, an acceptance of a mediocre reality or a wave in a rear-view mirror as the distances grow?

  At mid-morning, the distances have grown. The road has stopped dipping into little harbours and has turned inland, striking out across the barrens. The road signs have big-antlered caribou silhouette warnings as if prehistoric cave painters had got into the sign shop. The road is lined with sticks to guide the snowploughs, but there is little snow. What fell in St. John’s as snow was apparently mostly rain here. The barrens stretch away in all directions with only sparse, shrunken, frozen drifts, like white hairs in the brown pelt of blueberry bushes and moss.

  Gerry pulls over on a wide spot of gravel shoulder and sits and looks at the huge, windswept flatness extending to the pale bowl of winter sky in all directions. The wind buffets the car. Gerry feels you could fall off the earth here. There is nothing to hold onto to resist the upward suck of space. He slurps the last of the barely warm coffee from his thermal mug and wills himself to get out of the car and stretch.

  The wind is from the southwest and it’s mild for January. It’s like a sustained bass note on an organ, an ambient frequency, felt rather than heard.

  “Hey,” he yells tentatively. The wind sucks the syllable away as though it never existed. He calls up thirty years of radio presentation workshops and puts his diaphragm into a great shapeless roar that lasts until his lungs are empty. It sounds fragile and babyish, swallowed by the space. He feels shriven.

  Maybe this is what prayer’s supposed to be, he thinks, roaring at the sky until you feel good.

  Gerry sticks his coffee mug back in the car and slowly walks out on the barren ground. It’s like a carpet under a magnifying glass, a jumble of frozen mossy hummocks, tiny water courses hidden in the folds and rib-like mazes of sand and gravel that seem randomly bulldozed into place by the wind-scour. The white noise of the wind seems to be drawing him out of himself through his ears, an infinite sky poultice. He picks his way along the gravel ridges and hops across the rivulets that criss-cross the barren ground. An old rugby song comes from nowhere to his lips.

  “Why was he born so beautiful? Why was he born at all?” It becomes his barren anthem. “He’s no fucking use to man or beast. He’s no fucking use at all.”

  His feet dance to his words and the unwritten score of the tumbled ground. His arms pump for balance as he scissor-hops along his invisible trail. When he stops and turns, the Honda is a green bead, strung on the skyline half a mile away.

  “No fucking use to man or beast. He’s no fucking use at all,” he finishes, slightly breathless. “World without end. Amen.”

  He stands until the sweat he’s worked up starts to chill. He can see the highway for miles in either direction. A windshield flash on a hill crest miles away tells him that someone else is traversing his universe. He zips up his jacket and walks slowly back towards his car.

  Without the counterpoint of his man-or-beast hymn, the walk takes longer going back. He picks his way now, rather than dances, looking at micro-forests of moss, the Lilliputian lake systems of the potholes and the diamond sparkles in the gravel and ice. The car he spotted crossing the crest is coming up a low grade towards his vehicle as he walks the last fifty yards. It slows just perceptibly and he sees heads turn his way, wondering what he’s returning from, out on the barren. He imagines they’ll think he’s been poaching or having an alfresco crap out under the big sky. Religious pilgrimage probably doesn’t occur to them. The car passes in a private tornado of sound and dwindles on down the endless road. Gerry climbs into his own vehicle and watches until the car is out of sight. As he does, he sees movement on a low ridge. Three caribou briefly trace the skyline like passing sailing ships. Then they move down-grade and fade into the camouflage of the other light splashes and shadow-play of the barren. Gerry takes them as a benediction and pulls out onto the long empty road. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t feel cramped. It occurs to him that Viv would have liked to have seen the caribou, so perhaps he’s planning to bring some of this trip home.

  “He’s no fucking use to man or beast,” he sings as he drives across a watercolour vastness.

  It’s mid-day and Gerry drives down a long hill in second gear. He leaves the barrens behind him at the top of the curving hill and rejoins the sea at the bottom. He crosses a long beach-rock barachois and crosses an iron bridge over a swirling river mouth. A settlement hangs on the road like a string of wooden beads, the softball field a ceramic pendant on the other side of the road. There are few cars moving. An occasional ATV potters along the shoulder or brazens it out on the pavement. It is not the sort of community with work for many people. The cars that belong to the houses are away at jobs somewhere else. Gerry tries to imagine a commute across the barrens every morning at dawn. It seems surreally daunting, like a razor-edged steel butterfly.

  Gerry decides he’s hungry and pulls up at a corner store with a padlocked gas pump in front. Inside, the place is a shrine to failing small-retail. Half dozens of this and that stand in sparse, nervous groups at the front of deep shelves that were built to hold sacks of flour, cases of canned goods, toys and rubber boots and rope. A push-button cappuccino machine with a sign proclaiming the name of the supplier sits next to a couple of half-picked-over cards of last season’s trout flies.

  Extract from the Analects of Adamson, Gerry thinks. The sage does not buy a cappuccino in a place that sells bait.

  The woman behind the counter looks like a too-clean polyester bathroom decoration and has a mouth pinched from saying no to credit. She just manages a watery smile as Gerry selects from her sorry stock of snacks. Vienna sausages in the can, Doritos closing on their sell-by date and bottled juice, ditto,
are as good as it gets. Gerry pays and they exchange small talk about the weather and lack of snow. An overloud bell on a spring announces that he’s escaping out the door, another cash customer headed out of town.

  Some way up the road, Gerry parks at a provincial picnic ground by the ocean to eat his junk-food lunch. He hooks the centre sausage out of the tin with the small blade of his Swiss army knife and thinks about the woman in the store, resenting him for being there, for buying a piece of her shrinking empire, for disturbing her contemplation of an impeccably tidy ruin.

  Declining ambition makes you just as mean as big ambition, he thinks. How mean am I?

  Mid-afternoon shadows are getting longer when Gerry noses the Honda along the back road into the community where he keeps his boat. A few minutes before, he’d sat at a crossroad and tried to decide where he was going. A part of him plumped for a heedless run west, nights in motels, maybe even onto the ferry and on to God-knows-where. Sensitive waitresses would take pity on the nomad for the night and ride beside him vicariously as he drove off in the morning.

  “Yeah, right,” Gerry had said aloud. Did he really need more field notes to add to the gym bag or paper riding behind him? He pulled across the Trans Canada on the overpass and headed for the smallest piece of his world.

  Gerry pulls into his hibernating yacht club and parks. He walks around the tall shapes of cradled boats and down along the docks. The marina and boatyard are relatively free of snow. The thaw and rain at Christmas and the presence of the sea have kept it to gritty drifts on the shady side of cradles. Out in the basin, away from the current of the river, there’s a skin of new ice. One fat grey seal lies on it in the middle of the little harbour, a grey-mottled sausage with a self-indulgent cartoon-dog face. It reclines on one side, flippers clear of the ice, conserving heat. Gerry decides it’s an old seal, withdrawn from seal society. He supposes the sea trout in the river have attracted it.

  “Just you and me, buddy,” Gerry says to the seal. “Two fat old patriarchs, tired of our herds.” The seal doesn’t pay him much attention. It seems it’s only a coincidence of ice drift that the sharp end with eyes, nose and whiskers points towards him, like the bottle in spin-the-bottle. In the trees behind the clubhouse, crows shout. Gerry meanders back along the docks to his boat in the yard.

  Long ago, Gerry started making a point of always leaving all the boat’s various keys in the Honda’s virginal ashtray. He’d been caught too often, remembering that keys are on the hook by the fridge at home just when he tops the hill that leads down to the marina. Now he takes one and unlocks the padlocked chain that holds a homemade ladder to his cradle. He props it against the hull and scrambles up to inspect the cockpit. There’s a thick loaf of hardened snow between the seats. Leaves have slowed the cockpit drains, and ice has built up on the cockpit sole. It’s preserved the snowdrift on top of it. Gerry climbs over the life-lines and stands on the seat to uncleat one end of the blue plastic tarp he secures over the leaky sliding hatch in winter. Then he climbs down. He rummages another key out of the Honda’s ashtray and goes and unlocks the clubhouse. In a storage room he finds a snow shovel and carries it back to the boat. Then he collects a tool box from the back of his car. The fact that it’s there is not good planning on his part. It’s been riding there, rattling since October when the boat came out of the water.

  “The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action,” Gerry says to the empty boatyard. He climbs back aboard with the tools and shovel. Five or six shovelfuls and some determined chopping clears the little cockpit of snow and ice. Then he unscrews the winter plywood he keeps over the hatch splash boards.

  Who says being a slob doesn’t pay off? Gerry thinks as he lets himself into the boat. He’d meant to take the cushions off some nice day in November, but then his mother had her fall and he’d gone to Ottawa. When he came back, nice days seemed to get scarce and then it was Christmas. He’d come out on a sleety Sunday when it was too wet to put cushions on the roof rack. He’d just screwed the plywood on for security and left the cushions aboard.

  Maybe I knew I’d be coming back.

  As dusk sneaks into the yard, Gerry establishes his position. He digs out the boat’s extension cord and plugs in the small electric heater he keeps aboard. The inside of the boat smells musty. He turns the heater on high to dry things out. The battery is out of the boat, so he pinches a small table lamp from the club house and takes it aboard. Then he climbs back down the ladder and heads across the road on foot to buy supplies.

  Gerry and the woman behind the counter of the nearest convenience store find each other only vaguely familiar in winter. It’s as if he’s a migratory species, blown off course or inadvertently wintering over. He doesn’t fit the winter ecosystem of the town.

  “I guess you’re working on your boat?” she says. Her usual “Nice day for a sail,” is not applicable in January.

  Gerry does the kind of unexpectedly expensive shopping you do when you start from scratch. He buys salt and pepper in expensive, convenience store sizes, teas and more sugar than he’ll use if he stays all winter. He picks up onions and potatoes in pricey small-store packages and oriental noodles, assorted canned goods, bottled water and a jar of instant coffee which he knows he won’t like, even as he buys it.

  When did tastes in coffee change? he wonders. He remembers freeze-dried instant being almost a gourmet taste in the ’70s. Now none of it tastes good, and he knows he’ll drive to the nearest service station for something brewed.

  He tops off his order with a plastic jug of alcohol for the stove. He has to root for it behind cases of paint thinner. It’s a summer item.

  The woman behind the counter looks at him uneasily as she takes his money. This is not a convenience store order. This is the commissariat of a one-man retreating army, someone who doesn’t have a fixed address. She feels a twinge of the distrust the settled and successful have for nomadic losers. It starts to snow as he leaves the store, lugging handfuls of plastic bags. Big soft flakes at first but smaller and harder by the time he gets back to the boat, making a faint slithering rustle as it blows across his elevated fibreglass burrow.

  Gerry simmers a can of meatball stew with Chinese noodles for supper. He’s ready for something hot, unhealthy and hearty. He spent a chilling gloves-off ten minutes filling the alcohol stove in the cockpit so as not to slop fuel around the cabin. The interior of the boat takes on the smell of onions and gravy and damp wool. The interior of his shell is taking on his defining scents.

  Funny as a fart in a diving suit. A grade school joke floats through his mind as he does the small things necessary to prepare a hot meal, eat it and wipe up a pot and plate after. He feels pleasantly stuffed after he eats. He has eaten everything he’s cooked. His spaceship regimen allows for no storage of leftovers.

  Afterwards, with a large mug of tea beside him, Gerry hunches at the playhouse-size galley table with a sack of notebooks beside him on the berth. He pops a disk into his laptop and tentatively pokes a few keys. He calls up fragments he’s committed to disk, long ones that have been taken to the writing workshop and some that are no more than a file title.

  Capture the rapture with Duane and Gretchen, he’s written, and attached the name of a website that claims to give an accurate “rapture speedometer” to judge how the end of the world is coming along. Picnic in the Park with Ellen.

  Fragment: George Alone

  George sits at the laptop and listens to the wind outside. For days he’s felt like a shell-less oyster in a whirlwind of broken glass, too irritated to wrap any of it in nacre and stop the itch. Now, alone, the storm of shards seems to have abated. He feels almost lonely for the irritants he needs to make a pearl.

  What’s an oyster to do?

  Gerry blows a soft Bronx cheer and stops typing. He highlights the George fragment and hovers over the delete button, then relents, flicks off the highlighting and saves. The laptop is like playing a doll’s piano for fat-fingered Gerry.

&nbs
p; The hell with it. Save it. You can always throw it away later.

  He turns off the laptop and leans back on his berth, nursing his tea mug.

  Gerry wakes up in the middle of the night to the purr of his space heater’s fan cutting in. The element glows red inside, like a cigarette end, drawn on hard. The heater is only an arm’s length away from Gerry tucked up in his sleeping bag along one side of the boat cabin. He’s wearing a watch cap as a night cap, keeping his head warm where it protrudes from the end of the bag. The cabin is small and thickly insulated. It doesn’t take much to heat it. Now it’s cold but only the cold of a country kitchen before the fire is lit.

  Gerry decides he needs to pee, and outside and down the ladder in the snow is too much bother. He unzips the bag, turns on the lamp and sits on the edge of the berth. He roots in the galley locker and finds a bottle of water. He empties it into the kettle and then kneels on the cabin sole, hunched and prayer-like as he holds the neck to his cock and feels the bottle become heavier and hot in his hand.

  When he is finished he screws the cap on and puts the bottle by the hatch step. He rolls back into his sleeping bag with a satisfied feeling of having dealt with a survival issue.

  “House-broken under all and any circumstances,” he says aloud to the fibreglass over his head as he turns out the light.

  A tractor-trailer growls by the boatyard, heading from the tank farm down the road to the highway. Gerry squints to make out the luminous face of his watch. It’s only half past midnight. Elsewhere, people are just turning off the late edition of the news and getting ready for bed. He’s been asleep since nine or so.

  Despite the snow, the boatyard lights shed quite a lot of light through the plastic hatch in the forward part of the boat. He can make out the dim shape of the bag of papers he’d brought aboard and the flat, plastic sandwich of the laptop on the galley table.

  “Tomorrow,” he says aloud and moulds himself and his cocoon of bag to the curved bulkhead, feeling warmer now with an empty bladder. Tomorrow he’ll make up his mind about that George and the Oyster bit. Tomorrow he’ll start joining up the pieces he’s got. Tomorrow he’ll probably call Vivian and tell her where he is.