by Lynn Coady
“You listen here, Bill Hamm. Let me tell you about this boy. This boy is at the top of his class at school [this was not strictly the case]. This boy is here, working at his dad’s business four nights a week. I don’t let him work any more than that because he has to do his school work. We’re saving to send him to a good college when he graduates [if this was true, it was the first I’d heard of it]. This boy can do anything he wants with his time, but what does he want to do? He wants to help his old man.”
Constable Hamm was holding up his hands and opening and closing his mouth, desperate to get a word in, because it was clear Gord was only getting warmed up.
“And I’ll tell you. When I see drug-addled little shits like Mick Croft staggering around town, Bill Hamm, it makes me sick. But you know what else it does? It makes me weep. I weep for those boys, Bill Hamm. Because what do they have going for them? Do they have two stable parents who look after them? Do they have a family business to help run that keeps em off the streets at night? Do they have anywhere near the gifts or advantages of this little bastard right here? [Another thwack in the sternum.] No! They don’t! And so I weep! I weep for them! But I’ll tell you something else! This boy works his ass off four nights a week to help me run a clean, decent business. When those lousy punks wander in here cursing and pouring booze into their Cokes and lighting up joints in the back of my restaurant, you’re goddamn right he’s gonna kick their asses. He’s gonna kick their asses right out of here! He’s gonna kick their asses all over the goddamn parking lot if he has to. And do you know why?”
“Gordon,” said Bill Hamm.
“Do you know why? Because his father told him to, that’s why.”
With that, Gord slapped his palms down onto the table between us and sat there panting with righteousness. Constable Adams, I noticed, was scribbling furiously into his book.
“Gordon,” said Bill Hamm again, once he could be certain he wouldn’t be interrupted. “I only want to say this to you once. You call us. You don’t sic the boy on them. I know what you’re doing — you think you’ve got a secret weapon here. He’s under eighteen and a minor so the rules don’t apply. You think you’ve got a one-man vigilante force.”
I glanced over at Gord, surprised that the cop would give him so much credit. It was far too calculated. Gord had no master plan: he just wanted punks’ skulls busted and was thrilled to have someone around who could capably get the job done. It never occurred to me that he might be taking the legality of the situation into account when he sent me out into the parking lot. And by the way, had the cops entirely missed the fact that it was Gord who had nearly throttled Croft this evening, and me who held him back? I felt myself getting angry at approximately everyone present.
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “I was trying to stop it. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I was trying to calm Gord, um, Dad, down.”
“That’s right!” exclaimed Gord. “Like I said, I was ready to castrate the little bastard. If this boy hadn’t held me back . . .”
“I don’t particularly believe that,” remarked Constable Hamm, stunning us both into silence. He sniffed, then, causing his rectangular moustache to bounce around a little. “What I believe, Gordon, is that you let these kids provoke you. You enjoy it. If you didn’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t be sending the tank here after them every weekend — and believe me, we hear about it when you do. The boys over at the Legion think it’s better than TV. If you didn’t enjoy it, you’d be calling us, and we’d take care of it.”
A thoughtful stillness, entirely uncharacteristic, came over my father.
“And what would you do?” he sneered after a moment — the famous Rankin Sr. sneer. “You said yourself, these are kids. You people can’t do a goddamn thing but shoo them off home.”
“We come over, we tell them to leave, they leave,” replied Hamm. “It’s boring, for us and for them. After a while, they find something else to do, and you don’t have to worry about them anymore. But you don’t want that. You want your showdown in the parking lot. You want your dogfight.”
Dogfight. I thought about the handful of standoffs in the parking lot, Gord’s face on the other side of the restaurant window. Safe behind glass, miming punches, cheering me on.
At that moment, my father seemed to lose interest in the conversation. “Ah — bullshit,” he muttered.
“Anyway,” said Hamm, standing up. Adams followed him out of the booth as if they were conjoined. A second later Gord and I stood too. “That’s all we wanted to say tonight, Gordon. We wanted to let you know that we’re keeping an eye, and we’re happy to drop in anytime you need us. You just give us a call next time.”
“Wonderful,” said Gord, shaking Hamm’s extended hand so fast it was like he was wiping his hand on a dishtowel. “My Christ — haven’t we all just accomplished so much.” And with that, he turned away and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to show the policemen out.
That’s when Constable Bill Hamm turned to me and said something I never forgot. It was only the second time he’d looked at me, and for the second time in our conversation, the fake-friendly light he’d held in his eye while talking to Gord flickered into nothing.
“I know you,” he said then. “Understand that, Mr. Rankin. I see exactly where you’re headed, son.”
I stared back at him for a moment, making no sound because inside my head I was sputtering at the injustice of these words. “What?” I managed to sputter out loud, at last, to the cop. I wasn’t asking him to repeat himself, I didn’t say it like “Pardon?” I spread my hands as if to gesture to everything — the entire world surrounding me. It was my “I just want another hot dog” gesture. I’m only a kid, is what I was trying to transmit to Constable Hamm. It’s not my fault you have to tilt your chin upward to fix me with that null-eyed stare of yours. I’ve only been on this earth for fifteen years. Please don’t say this kind of thing to me.
“What,” repeated Constable Hamm. “You know what. We both know what.”
He turned his back — no handshake, nothing.
And that was my second big hint.
It wasn’t fair, but it was — it turned out — true. That’s what made Bill Hamm a kind of oracle. He wasn’t talking about right or wrong, good or evil, justice or injustice. He was a man plugged into the cosmos, a moustachioed fortune teller, just talking about the way life was — the way it was going to be. He was talking about fate. Fate’s representative stood in the Icy Dream that day like it was the temple at Delphi — and duly he pronounced.
Not bad for a university dropout, eh? I remember almost nothing from my undergraduate career, but I do remember the stuff you and I talked about, the classes we took together. You were studying English — very unoriginal, Adam — and you’ll recall that I was doing a basic humanities mishmash in the hope of discovering an aptitude for something other than skating at high speed directly into other versions of myself. Is it any surprise the stuff from Classical Lit would stick with me all this time? If you’re going to believe in one or more gods, I remember thinking, the gang from Mount Olympus made a lot more sense than the guy I’d been hearing about most of my life up until that point. Who are you going to believe runs the show if you are a citizen of Planet Earth with any kind of awareness as to what’s going on around you? Are you going to buy into the story about this great guy, who is actually somehow three guys, one-third human, and he loves everybody equally, and all he wants is for everyone to behave themselves? (But, oh yeah, sometimes tsunamis at Christmastime. Sometimes bombs on civilian populations. Sometimes mothers dying horribly.) Or do you believe in this self-absorbed pack of loons who couldn’t give a shit what happens on earth but just for fun decide to come down every once in a while to screw with us?
At nineteen years of age, three years following the extinguishment of Sylvia LeBlanc Rankin, glimmer of pure light, I remember feeling like I’d found a new religion. This was something I could believe in. It didn’t require me to feel bad, to do penance,
to confess or be contrite. It required nothing. This cosmology fully expected and understood my exasperation with what the universe had inflicted on me thus far — and didn’t care. The gods were dicks — end of story. They had all the power, and guys like Homer and Hesiod and Ovid were damned if they were going to let them off the hook for their dickish behaviour. Not like us Judeo-Christians. Not like we do with our own white-bearded fucker-in-the-sky. (And if that sounds harsh remember I do have some experience with this. I served on Our Lord’s custodial staff as an enthusiastic whitewasher of His mysterious ways for longer than I care to admit. In the hope that He’d return the favour.)
So that was good, that helped me for a while. Oh, I thought, Oh! You don’t care. That’s right, the cosmos patiently affirmed. You’re not punishing me, I gradually figured out; you don’t hate me. Hate you? Har, har, chortled the universe. Dude! You see a parade of ants trucking along and you cut off the route with a bunch of rocks or something just to watch them run in circles. As flies to wanton boys and all that.
It was weirdly reassuring. I was an ant — I was a fly. Sylvie was just another bug to them. So was Gord. So had been Ghandi, Saddam Hussein and Princess Di. All of us specks. Nothing personal. That felt good. I could deal with that.
Except of course you will recall what happened next — in what direction this new religion ended up taking me.
7
06/11/09, 5:44 p.m.
DID I EVER YELL YOU Gord’s famous pick-up line, from the first time he introduced himself to Sylvie? Sad. Two hicks working for isolation pay deep in the blackfly-riddled thickets of Northern Ontario.
“Well mother of Christ, they got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”
Another excerpt from their storybook romance that Sylvie never cared to talk about. It wasn’t the insult to her language and people, mind you, but the cavalier name-in-vain-taking of Our Holy Mother. Sylvie was about a hundred times more Catholic than Gord. It was all about Notre Dame in Sylvie’s neck of the wood, so my old man’s offhand blasphemy — as natural to Gord as scratching his nuts — came very close to losing him the ball game.
Not close enough, unfortunately for every last one of us. If the gods were keeping a pie-plate eye that day, they decided to let the ants go marching blindly forward.
Sylvie was wearing hip waders for the occasion, standing with a fishing pole up to her knees in the Firesteel River as my dad came sloshing over, heedless of soaking his pants, more than a little sloshed himself.
“They biting?” he hollered, slipping on a rock as he approached and having to steady himself against her.
Sylvie frowned as she teetered, bracing her stomach muscles. Not yet annoyed, as she tells it, only perplexed. She didn’t understand how any self-respecting young man from a no-doubt rural, fishing-and-hunting background similar to her own could come sloshing through the river toward her, hollering greetings, and then exhibit, peacocklike, the sheer, splendored idiocy to ask, “Are they biting?”
“No,” replied Sylvie. “Dey aren’t biting.”
Gord, as unperceptive as he’d already proven himself to be, didn’t miss a beat when he caught wind of the accent.
“Well mother of Christ,” he remarked. “They got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”
How is it my life unfurls from a seed as insignificant and stupid as this, Adam? And what kills me is, it isn’t even my seed. I was adopted, for the love of god. It’s not my life; they weren’t my parents. Somewhere, perhaps at precisely the same moment, two giants came together. You know how that happens — the tall girl no one will ask to dance. Until a man even taller comes along, surveys the room with scorn, like Check it out, short-ass losers. And together, they take the floor. She inclines her endless neck up at him, at last, in gratitude.
Or, I don’t know. All I know are here are these two tiny little people standing in a river in Northern Ontario as the gods keep watch, or don’t. A drunken east coast stereotype insults a fine-boned French girl of slender means. Problem is, they have both nothing and everything in common. They are hicks. They are broke. They are working at the building site of a hydro electrical generating station for isolation pay at White Dog Falls because the world has nothing else to offer them as yet. It is 1965 and kids their age are rioting in the cities, upending the socio-sexual landscape, but my soon-to-be parents are farm people, terrified of cities, of drugs, of the irreligious, of those who walk around wearing entirely different coloured skin from them. The world is changing, rapidly, dizzyingly, and change is something they’ve both been raised to fear. They have this in common: they want no part of it.
And that’s the only explanation I come up with when the question comes to mind, as it so frequently has throughout my life. You know the question: Why did she marry the prick? We all know why she stayed with him: Notre Dame. The abiding influence of Mother Church and her sacred bellyful of domineering fathers. Our Lady of the Sit There and Take It. But why marry Gord in the first place? The world had nothing else to offer, maybe — nothing so comfy and familiar as some freckled knee-jerk French-hater telling her she’s useless.
Sylvie had this terrible story she used to tell about her time up North. That is, she didn’t think it was so terrible — to her it was just a footnote to one of the handful of heroic-outdoorswoman narratives that she cultivated pre-Gord. She was proud of those days, because she was one of the only women working up at the hydro electrical sites when they were being built — these places were nothing but backhoes and Quonset huts, not to mention about fifty men for every woman. She would talk about day-long trips by freighter canoe to Moose Factory, about choking back the contents of her stomach during convulsive, vertiginous flights along the Abitibi River in two-seater planes. Sylvie seemed to be wearing hip waders in most of these stories, if not an ammunition vest and deer scent. It’s hard to picture it now, and was hard to picture it then, listening to her talk about those times while watching her fuss with her favourite elephant teapot or tape a colourful swath of fabric over the hole I had kicked in the cupboard in the house that Gord built.
But in those days, Sylvie was a badass. She shot ducks out of the sky. She wrestled pike from the rivers. She castrated bucks. And then she met Gord.
This story she told was about a goose hunting trip to James Bay that she took with none other than her new, red-headed boyfriend — this Rankin fella — and another girl she worked with at the site’s “office” (i.e., a trailer plunked down in a field of mud) just so no one back at camp would get the wrong idea.
And I’ll tell you now that thinking about this story always sends a little shudder through my intestines. Because on this particular occasion, I think, the gods really were watching. This was the moment in Gord and Sylvie’s lives — in my life, by extension — when the gods shifted forward in their divine Barcaloungers, scrambled to turn the volume up on their jewel-encrusted remotes.
That is, the trip to James Bay was cursed. Or divinely ordained, depending on how you look at it. It was still early days with Gord, and he was doing his best to macho it up for the ladies, giving Sylvie, who needed no help whatsoever, pointers on her shooting technique, offering Myrna his sweater when the evening got chilly — a move he regretted because Myrna, who was a big girl, wore the sweater all weekend and ended up stretching out the chest, rendering it unwearable to anyone not sporting a pair of 38Ds. He even tried to banter with the two Indian guides, who refused to be bantered with and at the end of the day always set up their tent and fire several deliberate feet away from the rest of them.
Still, things were fine until the middle of one night when the Indian guides broke their silence to plunge into everybody’s tents and shout at them to pack everything up immediately because the tide was rushing in.
I don’t quite understand the geophysical logistics of this, but the way Sylvie tells it, they got stuck. Their boat was on one side of the water, and they were on the other, and the tide somehow stayed put another two whole days. They couldn�
��t get out. They ran out of smokes. They had nothing to do. Their food was gone and so they tried boiling one of the geese they had slaughtered over the weekend. The smell was obscene and Sylvie couldn’t eat it. Monday went by, then Tuesday. They were, of course, due back at the site. They began to starve.
Quite the test of manhood for our buddy Gord. And how’d he fare? Sylvie never said, really. They were basically stuck on a spit of land with nothing to do but try to figure out how to make boiled snow goose palatable. Gord didn’t have a lot to work with, no matter what reserves of masculine ingenuity he might have been carrying around with him. You’d think the Indians would’ve had a few tricks up their sleeves, but no. So much for the one-with-nature stereotype — they hadn’t even known the tide was coming in. They just sat around their fire, occasionally taking pot shots at any random flock of geese that happened to be passing overhead. At this point, those honking, sky-encompassing flocks — the sheer numbers of them sailing overhead in almost intelligible patterns — added insult to injury. Nobody wanted to see another goose again.
One thing about the Indians, though, was that they didn’t seem too ruffled by the predicament. They were content to sit and wait for nature to take its course.
“They were patient,” remembered Sylvie. “So we decided to just be patient too.”
Being patient doesn’t sound like a particularly Gordian strategy to me, but then again, this was a time before Gord was really Gord and Sylvie was really Sylvie, as far as I’m concerned. What I mean is, over the years I’ve become more and more convinced that the James Bay Goose Hunt Calamity of ’66 represents a kind of hinge in my parents’ lives. It’s one of those before-and-after moments. The gods saw it. That’s why they stuck the two of them out there on that spit for a while — to let things really soak in. To make sure the changes took.
I don’t know how it worked for Gord exactly. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t a prick before then. Maybe the insult of it all — the unsociable Indians, the boiled goose, the wrecked, tit-imprinted sweater, is what pushed him over the edge; maybe before that he’d just been another lovable leprechaun of a working man. Like I said, I don’t know. It’s not a story Gord ever told. It was a story Sylvie told.