You Could Believe in Nothing

by Jamie Fitzpatrick

  There were nomads, who disappeared for months at a time and returned with pots of mainland money, and foragers, happy to cobble together a few substitute teaching days or government-funded scraps. Then there was Lenny Yetman, who didn’t do much of anything. His charmed, idle youth was declining to seedy middle age. He would soon be the neighbourhood weird man, going to the store for a six-pack in the morning and sitting on his front step in an undershirt.

  The game was underway, the camera jiggling and pitching to one side as it followed the puck into the corner.

  “Here is where those stories play out, where they are most honest with themselves.”

  Gover’s wife was dead. Matt, the second goalie, had a youngster in a wheelchair. There were the usual townie entanglements. (Nels Pittman’s ex-wife lived with the brother of one of Derek’s old girlfriends, who had previously been with Heneghan’s best friend, who had helped end Nels’s marriage by carrying on with the now ex-wife. And so on.) There were two sets of cousins, one pair of brothers—Kev and Davey Byrne, not quite reconciled from a falling out over who would look after Dad—and no telling how many adulterers and alcoholics.

  Brian: “We all been at it since we were kids.”

  Allan stood at centre ice, Derek and the others hacking and shoving behind him.

  “Here’s where the boy inside the man takes over. This sweet and savage game, this primal game, sustains them.”

  The wobbling camera and jumpy edits were deliberate, meant to signal Allan’s authenticity, his grasp of the real. He couldn’t keep still.

  “I still get butterflies, you know”—Brian again—“even though it’s just the boys and we’ve been doing it forever. I just love it.”

  The telephone rang. Derek checked the number.

  “It’s as if these guys know a secret,” said Allan.

  Derek reached for the phone, faltered, and reached again.

  “A secret that courses in their veins. A secret about being a man.”

  The third ring. Now or never.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, marvellous creature.”

  “How’s mainland life?”

  “Good, good, good.” Nikki’s voice descended to a murmur. “Have you replaced me yet? Is she there now?”

  Heneghan and Whelan gazed from the screen like reptiles in a terrarium, faces glistening and eyes bulbous. They exploded in laughter at a joke Derek didn’t hear.

  “I’m on TV.”

  “Why? You’ve been arrested?”

  “Remember I told you about the CBC guy?”

  “Oh my God, is that on right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait. I can get it on digital. I think it’s 160 or something…”

  She fumbled the phone, then shrieked.

  “There you are! That’s you guys!”

  There was a brief shot of Kev Byrne flailing at the puck and falling to his knees.

  “Is that that guy who got pissed at his own wedding? Remember he got sick and everything?”

  “That’s him,” said Derek. Shawn Gover skated around Derek and scored over Matt’s shoulder. Made an ass of himself celebrating.

  “Just ’cause you grow old, doesn’t mean you have to grow up,” said Brian.

  “Buddy took the offer. So I’m in. I bought the condo.”

  “Pure joy,” said Allan. “If you find that joy, it’s something to cling to.”

  Derek’s temples went tight, and his scrotum did a little shimmy.

  “Is this the guy who had to sell because his wife left him after the heart attack?”

  “…a slower game as they get older. But maybe a sweeter game too.”

  “Well, I think the wife left first.”

  Gover again, the camera closing in as he removed a glove and wiped sweat from his eyes. His grey mustache twitched, his mouth working hard on a wad of gum.

  “An anchor, a foundation,” said Allan. “Timeless.”

  There was more random footage of the game, in slow motion. Colours streaked and swirled and faces became indistinguishable.

  “I’m just a bit freaked out by the whole idea of a mortgage. I’m alone up here.”

  “Profoundly tribal and unchanging, it frees them from the noise of daily life…”

  “Feels like there’s nothing under me.”

  I’m not under you, thought Derek, and shuffled his feet on the floor in irritation.

  “…they reclaim a piece of themselves.”

  A vivid quiltwork of images filled the screen, with moments from St. Bon’s—Derek spotted himself gasping on the bench, a thread of spit stretching from his chin—segued into hazy bits of footage from strange games, other eras. A fog, an intentional blur, had been laid over everything. Allan had apparently cut the narrative cord altogether.

  “To me, this is the real Newfoundland right now,” said Murph.

  “To watch these guys striving, always charging ahead, fighting the passage of time, is to see a little slice of the Newfoundland story.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Nicole. “He’s playing the Newfoundland card.”

  “You got to go hard,” said Heneghan, over a slo-mo of three skaters colliding in the corner. “You got to fight and sweat to make a go of it around here.”

  “Rooted in this place, that’s what we do,” said Allan. “We go hard, we fight, and endure.”

  “We poetic souls,” added Nicole. “Clinging to this hard and unforgiving rock in the sea.”

  It was a favourite target of hers, the rhetoric of Newfoundland transcendence, in which a people of mighty spirit prevail through shit weather and blundering history to find a deeper level of consciousness. A particularly earnest school teacher—“The high priest of Newfoundland,” she called him—had triggered her bullshit detector on this front some years ago.

  “What next?” she said. “I expect he’ll start moaning about Beaumont-Hamel or the cod stocks.”

  In fact, Allan had done a story on the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel weeks before, travelling to France, roaming no man’s land, and perching at the foot of the big caribou statue to repeat the standard Great War pieties: Flower of Newfoundland youth cut down at the whim of bumbling, toffee-nosed Brits; fledgling nation crippled by loss.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to call someone. I had to call you. I know I haven’t earned it.”

  “I can’t help you, Nik,” said Derek, surprising himself.

  “I know,” she said.

  “That was Allan’s report,” added Pamela helpfully. “Once again, a different slant on things that maybe we don’t always look at in quite the same light.”

  “Mmm,” said Richard, grinning at his script.

  Shawn Gover’s fear of television had been unfounded, in this case at least. Allan didn’t tell anyone’s story, real or contrived. His method was willfully obscure. There was no intrusion or exposure. There wasn’t enough humanity in it to expose anyone.

  Upstairs, Derek checked email, opening an “All Staff” notice from work.

  In case some of you don’t know, Billy Wright’s dad passed away this week. We made a donation to the Heart and Stroke Foundation and sent a wreath also. Funeral is Sunday, 2:00 pm at Wesley United Church (Patrick St). Interment at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

  He pictured Billy at the funeral home, lording over another corpse. Kelly would surely be back at his side, eyes puckered and sleepless.

  He lingered on the Internet for a while, looking at porn and unbuckling his belt. An email from Nicole arrived just as he was working his hand under his waistband.

  Sorry I was so nasty about the TV thing. I’m just so tired of Newfoundland and everyone thinking their so superior. Stupid little fucking island.

  That was all. A stroke of undiluted honesty.

  Derek clicked the reply button. I have to tell you somethin
g about my father, he wrote, and then paused, almost deciding not to continue.

  He went back to the porn—chaste, glowing nude scenes from mainstream movies—and wriggled his jeans to his knees.

  When he was finished and cleaned up, perspiring lightly and taking deep, calming breaths, he felt the expected shame nibbling at his insides. But shame was everywhere lately, and Derek was sick of it. He wasn’t buying it anymore.

  Nerves settled, he resumed the email, telling Nicole what had happened to his family.

  The woman on the sports highlight channel was smooth and shiny, built like a hard-shell suitcase. When she talked, it looked like the lower half of her face had been wedged open.

  What did lonely men do before television? Life’s downward spiral must have been even more abrupt back then.

  When Nikki left, Derek had imagined himself in a series of striking scenes. Seated at a solitary table in a small café, with a two-day stubble and his eyes turned a cold winter blue. Evenings at home with the lights dimmed, lost in the past. Walking the streets in purple twilight to chase away memories. Seeing him hunched and stricken, deep in a dream, women would ache for him. A specific ache, coiling around the hips.

  Heartbreak, it turned out, was not quite so grand. The streets of St. John’s were full of depressed men, shuffling to the corner store and back, making a show of themselves. Wallowing in it, as if fucking up your life was a higher calling. Nobody took much notice of them. Coffee shops were all laptops and shrieking espresso machines. And it was fine to stand alone at your window as the day faded, especially if the horizon sent out a shaft of velvet sunlight. That was a fine moment. Then what?

  A kind of mental illness is what it was, punctuated by spasms of pleasure. For long stretches it was boring. Boring as shit. Derek watched a lot of crap television and drank three beers every night. Not much poetry in that. His longing for Nicole grew tiresome. He was tormented by a recurring dream, in which he tracked her through a strange house, from room to empty room, catching glimpses of her dark thighs or the soles of her feet. The futility of it, he thought. There might be a lesson in that.

  Scrolling through the on-screen guide without much hope, he struck a rich vein: the last forty minutes of Sink the Bismarck! Secure in his command centre beneath London, Captain Shepard stalked the Nazi scourge to its North Atlantic grave. A stressful duty, but more easily borne when a man could excite the sympathy of his second officer, with her towering cheekbones and satin lips.

  Fantasies of sheltered heroism had filled Derek’s boyhood. Let others charge into the breach, gunning down Krauts and Japs by the score. Derek held back, pulling the strings of war from a bunker or airfield clubhouse. Model ships shifted about on a table of vast ocean blue. Subordinates rushed in with urgent bulletins. A map of the world spanned an entire wall: the full tapestry of war. Young women with calves like inverted teardrops mounted stepladders and inserted pins of various colours to mark the progress of one campaign or another.

  In his most elaborate flights, Derek switched sides, joining Nazi officers at mountain chalets or lakeside estates, where they slurped brandy and laughed uproariously, pliant Hannahs and Helgas drifting among them like music in the air. In the movies, they paid for this decadence when they were slaughtered, snifters in hand, by marauding gangs of hard-ass commandos. Derek could not abide this ending, and in his bedroom it was the American heroes who paid for their intrusion, crashing into the buffet table under a hail of bullets, spilling an enormous ham and barely touched platter of caviar.

  He drank rum until the movie ended, with the captain and second officer on their way to breakfast, after which they would inflame the captain’s bed with the kind of lovemaking known only during wartime, with its fear that every day might be your last.

  It was beyond time for bed, but the daydreamer in Derek couldn’t resist 1965, with its bare-headed hockey players and ice-making wagons.

  Beyond the margins of the screen, Bobby Hull erupts again. He comes into view in full flight, up the middle, no plan, oblivious to opponents and teammates. He fights with his wife, drinks in a rage, pulls the shotgun. Won’t win another Cup. At least he has this place; unreal, but more real than anything else. Now he tries to squeeze through two Red Wings, but it’s too ambitious, and his charge ends in disarray.

  Pissed with himself, he retrieves the puck and stops at the blue line. There ought to be a pause here, a collective intake of breath. But suspense doesn’t interest Bobby Hull, who wheels and pounds a shot through the goaltender. The Red Wings go limp. The hometown crowd falls silent. Hull flashes his fuck-you grin. What was it Murph had said? You could believe in nothing. Somewhere beyond the television lights, Lou Langdon rises to his feet. A new name, a name without a past. Watching Bobby Hull tear the game apart must feel like the rush of too many possibilities.

  Derek’s groin twitched. Not an ache, just the fishing-line tug. An echoing voice broke through his insomniac’s drift.

  “Let’s have another look at that goal,” said Bill, cueing the replay.

  But it wasn’t Bill or Jim who caught Derek’s ear. There was another voice, coming from deep inside the television, or so it seemed. Derek reversed the disc and ran the moment again. It was just before the puck dropped to resume the game after Hull’s goal. Excitement rippled up Derek’s back and into his head. His testicle danced. He got down on his knees with an ear to the speaker, turned up the volume, and ran the moment a third and fourth time, so that the voice boomed from the rafters of the Detroit Olympia:

  John Ogilvie, please report to the main office. John Ogilvie to the main office, please.

  Derek laughed out loud in disbelief. But what was John Ogilvie doing there?

  This was not his place, not his family. Not his future.

  NINE

  Lou Langdon ought to be showing the strain. That’s how Derek saw it.

  A man facing humiliation should be marked with it. The hair would be a giveaway, losing its shape and falling in greasy strands. His face should be veined and sapped of colour, like dead leaves. Grubby, neglected fingernails would be a nice touch.

  But Lou sat in the passenger seat of Derek’s car looking somewhat amused, smiling faintly out the window, rubbing a hand over his smooth-shaven face. He gave off a minty smell and tugged at the sleeves of a charcoal blazer.

  Derek was on the phone with his sister.

  “Joey’s doing beer can chicken,” said Cynthia. “We’ll put on an extra baked potato for you.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  They were both driving too fast, she on the Outer Ring Road, frost bumps thundering beneath her feet, and Derek coasting down Patrick Street to Wesley United.

  “Are you eating?”

  “Yes, I’m eating. Jesus Christ.”

  “Alone all the time in that old apartment.”

  He heard the peeling and parting of her mouth, the pink goo she applied to it every day.

  “How do you know I’m alone?”

  Her reply was lost in a hiss of interference, like meat hitting a hot skillet. Derek knew she would brush away such bravado.

  “We’re just on our way into the funeral now, me and Dad,” said Derek.

  “He seems okay, these days.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mom too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Amazingly okay. Both of them.” The pink mouth smacked with disappointment. “Dad’s funny, eh?” she said. “It’s like he cast his lot with a younger version of himself. Remember, back when we were kids? That was the real him.”

  The small parking lot looked full, but Derek found a place along the curb. Rain began, and two elderly women crossed in front of the windshield, handbags held flat over their heads. Lou opened his door. Derek lifted his chin from the phone. “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  “I’m going over for a word with Mom,” said Cindy. “
She sounded agitated this morning. I think the lawyer was over there last night.”

  Derek watched his father jog between parked cars as the rain came in strafing bursts. A few men loitered under the arch at the church entrance, hands in pockets. Lou met them with nods, and hurried past. From around the corner of the building, a hearse came into view, making its theatrical crawl to the foot of the steps.

  “The old man looks fresh as a daisy,” said Derek.

  Cynthia blew a frustrated sigh through the phone. “I can believe it,” she said.

  Derek was late for the service, but so were plenty of others. It took him a minute to find his father, saving a place for him in a crowded side pew.

  There is a type of man who declares his engagement with the world in the breezy utility of his dress. Not for him the buttoned-down shirt with its prissy necktie. His pace calls for a polo tucked into sharply creased slacks. The shoes are loafers, so as not to delay him, bent and undignified, fumbling with laces at the start of the day. His hair sweeps over the crown and behind the ears, as if pinned back by his velocity. This man was abundant at the funeral of William Wright—wholesaler and distributor, Rotarian, angler, and past president of the North Arm River Watershed Management Association—though a few were squeezed into dark suits for the occasion. They strode quickly up the aisles and sat erect, unflinching before the spectre of death.

  The casket wheeled by with its solemn pallbearers, church light playing on the walnut finish. The gurney made not a sound, even at close range. Billy walked with his two sisters and held his boy by the hand. The squeak of Billy’s steps rose above the organ music. Derek examined the thick crepe soles. Surely a man could find better shoes than that to bury his father? The mustache was gone, but Billy still wore his curly hair down to the collar.

  Next came spouses and children, most of them teenagers. Kelly was in that group, an arm around her mother’s waist. Mrs. Ferguson caught Derek’s eye and offered a regal nod. She looked bright, the clouds having lifted.

  The family filled two front pews, and the organ finished abruptly, with the whump of a pedal.