You Could Believe in Nothing

by Jamie Fitzpatrick

  Shawn Gover lowered his gaze and tilted his head, peeking beneath the corners of his two cards. “All in,” he said, pushing a mess of chips to the centre.

  “That’s crazy, Shawn,” said Brian. He held the deck, his thumb ready to pull from the top.

  “Deal the fucking cards, banker boy,” said Gover, and watched the final flip. Three of spades. Byrne hooted, sweeping the pot towards him with two hands. Gover rose from the table. “Cocksucker,” he said.

  They were all flushed and exhausted and getting manically drunk. All except Derek, who hadn’t worked up much of a sweat, thanks to his troubled undercarriage. He sat apart from the card game, at a picnic table with a television at one end. It was an old TV borrowed from somebody’s basement. Not a bad picture for rabbit ears. The hockey game onscreen was headed to overtime. A beer commercial blared.

  Gover mixed a drink at a table crowded with rum, coke, and empties. Next to him, a reinforced wooden bin, big enough to hold several bodies, was packed full with beer and snow. Gover turned and approached Derek, stirring rum and coke with a forefinger.

  “Some slow game again tonight, man,” he said, taking a seat. “Fucking sad.”

  Fluorescent light flooded the room around them, gleaming on the shiny grey walls. The floor was unvarnished, well-worn lumber.

  Stacey circled the room in her baggy nylon tracksuit, still sexless, taking five-dollar bills for a pool on the overtime goal.

  “Pick your scorers before the end of intermission,” she said.

  “I know,” said Derek.

  “One from each team, no duplicates.”

  “Hey, Stacey,” shouted Griffin. “Is it Stacey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that last one in?”

  “We’ll never know,” she said. “It was under my ass, right at the line.”

  Gover leaned across the television and motioned over Derek’s shoulder. “Check this out.”

  Derek turned to see Allan Marleau grasping for his notebook, which was held at arm’s length by Nels Pittman.

  “Hey, guys,” said Allan, reaching. “Not cool, okay?”

  Brian waved at Nels. “Whoa! Guys? A little respect please? Just wanted to invite Allan for a drink and thank him for everything he did.”

  “Come on, guys,” said Allan. “Those are my notes.”

  There was a pause in the poker game, and schoolyard sniggering at Allan’s plight.

  Fending him off with a straight-arm, Nels flipped the notebook open. “Says here that him and Brian are lovers. Says Brian likes it up the ass.”

  Derek could read the hurt and confusion in Allan’s eyes. He had the power to put people on television. Even better, he had earned this crowd a few precious moments on Hockey Night in Canada. Why didn’t they love him? Why the hostility?

  Gover grinned with relish at Allan’s humiliation. Derek stood and made for the door, the one leading back to rink level. He was almost certain that he and Nicole had never shared a moment as real as the night he walked home from the party with Joan St. Croix, twenty years ago or whenever it was. Nor had Nicole ever been honest with him the way Kelly was, with her crazy story about wanting to have a kid with him.

  Down the hall from the party room, the second floor opened to a balcony hanging over the ice. Derek stopped there, and hit Nicole’s number on speed dial. The noise from the game below would give them privacy.

  “You’re at the rink,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tonight’s the Easter party, right?”

  “I fucked up my groin, I think.”

  “Ouch. That must be awful.”

  “It’s been going on a while. It’s been bad for a few days.”

  “Call Sarah’s clinic. They have an after-hours number. They’ll get you in right away.”

  “What did you mean in that email, about how I won’t talk about the past?”

  “Oh shit. Do we have to do this now?”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because you’re drinking is why not.” She was briefly lost in the noise from the ice, voices and skates. “—anyone else before me?”

  “What?”

  “I said, did you ever live with another woman before me?”

  “No.”

  “It’s like you have no history, Derek. It’s like you came out of nowhere. How can I trust someone like that?”

  “And you’ve got history everywhere.”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said. The restraint in her voice was breaking down. “And you know what? It fucking kills me sometimes.”

  Her hard, quivering breath filled the telephone. This wasn’t going as planned.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like to walk out on someone you wanted to marry, like I did with Bruce? Or what it’s like to tell someone you love that you just gave them a fucking disease? You have no idea. I could tell by looking at you.”

  “Well.” Derek staggered and leaned into the balcony rail for support. “Well, I’m not sure running across the country helps anything.”

  “Oh, it does. Believe me, it helps. At least I can get up in the morning and breathe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jesus, Derek. Not now.” Her voice was catching, losing strength. The words thickened in her nose. “I have to go. I’ve got so much on this weekend. Will you please go to the clinic? Sarah would even see you on the weekend, I bet.”

  “Not with this problem.”

  “She’s a doctor.”

  “She’s your sister. Just because she knows everything about you…”

  “She doesn’t. I haven’t talked to her since…Shit, Derek, I have to go.”

  “We should have had a plan.”

  “Plans are hopeless. They just get washed away by events. They just get…humiliated.”

  The card game was over, the party down to about ten bodies. Derek joined Kev Byrne and Steve Heneghan, huddled at the beer cooler, where an open staircase led down to a fire exit.

  “What’s the policy?” asked Kev. “The process?”

  “I don’t know,” said Heneghan. “It only happened this week.”

  “But it was just the two of you in her office?”

  “Yeah. And she says, ‘I’ll use whatever it takes to get results here. Anything I got.’ ”

  “And you said something about her sweater?”

  “ ‘Like that tight sweater.’ That’s all I said.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “But that’s what she was talking about.”

  “Don’t matter. She didn’t say it. Don’t fucking matter what she said anyway.”

  “She’s never been shy about it.”

  “Don’t matter.”

  “So I’m fucked.”

  “Well, depending on your harassment policy…Yeah, I imagine you’re fucked.”

  “You’re Derek?” said Stacey, crossing the room. “The guy with the groin? You hit the jackpot.” She grabbed his hand and planted a fistful of dollars in the palm. “You had Gagne for the game-winner.”

  Beyond her, the television made a sizzling noise of celebration. Miniature figures on the screen gathered in a group hug, black helmets bobbing. Derek counted and smoothed the bills. Sixty-five bucks.

  “See what I mean,” said Leo Murphy, going nose to nose with Allan. “There’s your story. It’s nostalgia for meaning. That’s the story.”

  Allan backed up against the cooler, close to Derek. His arms were folded in front of him to hold Murph at bay.

  “It’s something they can touch,” said Murph, pointing to the television. “They want it to be true. They want it to be real.”

  Derek picked his jacket from the back of a wooden chair and slipped his arms through the sleeves.

  “You’re not leaving?” said Brian.

 
“Long night already.”

  “Come on. Couple more beers. It’s Holy Thursday. The tradition.”

  Derek shrugged.

  “This is important,” said Brian. He opened his arms, indicating the wealth of booze before them. “It’s the boys. Holy Thursday.”

  Nels Pittman gave Brian a queer look. This sort of earnestness, imposing significance, it broke their rules. It was disrespectful. Go fuck yourself. That was respect. That’s how they got along all these years.

  “Hey, guys.” Allan came between them, his handheld camera lifted to one eye and pointed at Derek.

  “Get that thing out of my face.”

  “Come on, this is great stuff,” said Allan.

  “Fuck you,” said Derek, pushing the camera so it jammed Allan’s glasses into his face.

  Pittman stepped between them. “Why don’t you tell us what you were talking about on television? ‘Profoundly tribal.’ Profoundly. Enlighten us some more, Mister Profound.”

  Allan fumbled with his glasses and looked from Nels to Derek, then raised an index finger and let it rest on Derek’s shoulder.

  “Are you trying to heavy me, my friend?” His breath was hot and beery. “You want to mess around? Because I know all about the shit that’s going down up at Classix. One of the old boys couldn’t keep it in his pants, eh, my friend?”

  Derek grabbed Allan by the wrist and turned it. He gave the opposite shoulder a gentle shove, and felt the wrist slip from his hand. Allan teetered for a long moment, arms outstretched like a leathery Jesus, light gleaming in the slick black of his jacket. Then his eyes grew wide and he tipped backwards, disappearing down the fire escape stairs with a thundering wooden sound.

  “Whoa!” said Brian. “Whoa!”

  In the dark at the bottom of the steps, Allan sprawled against a mountain of hockey bags. He thrashed at them, trying to find his legs.

  Derek’s body shook and he smelled the sweat from his hands. He could either compose himself and leave right now, or go down there and smash the prick in the face.

  “Whoa!”

  Derek ran down the stairs. Seeing him approach, Allan leaned back and raised his boots in defense. Derek tried a roundhouse kick to the head, missing wildly. Someone tackled him, and the hard edge of a wooden step cracked sharp at the back of his head. Everything went black, and then fireworks exploded white and blue in his eyes. His vision returned, narrowed to a small window. Faces shifted in and out of view, slow and watery. A fist clipped the side of Allan’s head, sent his glasses flying away. Shawn Gover.

  Derek was detached from it all, trapped in a diving bell at the floor of a deep, dark sea. His mouth was bitter, and without thinking about it he spat hard, watched the phlegm boomerang from his lips. Somebody crashed into the fire exit door, swinging it open to a rush of cold air.

  A shattering of glass from above, then a chorus of shouts, brought the fight to a halt. At the top of the steps, Kev Byrne held Nels Pittman from behind. Pittman’s thin face strained against its skin, and his breath whistled through his teeth. He struggled to break free. From the bottom of the dark stairs, the two of them were illuminated, framed in fluorescent light.

  “I can’t stand it,” said Nels, almost in a whisper.

  “Easy, easy.” Kev had his arms pinned, speaking over his shoulder. “Can’t stand what, Nels?”

  Pittman shook his head and let out a howl, cutting through the murk and pulling Derek back to the surface of things. Then Nels appeared to go slack, and his head dropped to his chest, as if in shame. Kev slowly released his grip.

  “Ahh,” said Nels. “Ahh, ahhhh.” Hoarse sighs, or sobs, that didn’t sound like him. Sweat covered his face and soaked through his shirt.

  A still moment.

  Then, with one balletic flourish, Nels dropped an arm under the plywood table at his side and flipped it. Beer bottles and plastic cups turned in the air like juggler’s pins, spewing their dregs and tumbling down the stairs. Derek covered his head with his hands and curled into a foxhole created by the wedge between two hockey bags. He squeezed himself together, held his breath against the bolt of pain deep in his crotch.

  It was later, after Brian restored order and forced conciliatory drinks on everyone; after Kev demanded an apology to Allan, was denounced as a pompous fuck, and walked out in a stream of curses; after Brian exploded in anger, declaring that Derek and Nels would never play again because they didn’t respect the game or its traditions; after Shawn Gover raised a silent fist to Brian’s chin and walked out the door; after the guy from the rink surveyed the damage and wearily sent them all on their way; it was later, when he was alone, that Derek owned up to the vision that had come over him at the bottom of the stairway.

  The blow to the head had unlocked his imagination, bringing Joan St. Croix’s story back in all its adolescent beauty. While the bottles rained down, he saw Joan’s mother as he had always known her, reclined in her hotel office, arms stretched in supplication and face ecstatic.

  But the exalted vision didn’t return in full detail until Derek was home, swallowing Tylenol and searching the refrigerator. Only then could he admit that the fantasy was changed. The bodies thumping mechanically on the creaking desk were not Joan’s mother and her anonymous lover. Somewhere in the far reaches of his mind, Derek had reinvented the scene. Lou Langdon wore his cherry-red cardigan. Silver wisps of hair hung about his eyes, which were shut tight in agonized concentration. The dimpled thighs below, taking him in, belonged to Kelly. Her breath came in theatrical gasps.

  His imagination was at it again, surprising him with its flair for distortion and depravity. Derek was fighting to keep his life on separate tracks, so that one lurching series of events didn’t fall over into the next. But his imagination intruded, making a jumble of it all, insisting that such distinctions are false. Any moment of sex or happiness or betrayal is much like another, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

  His disgust was tempered by an appreciation of what might have been. It might have been Nicole.

  If he had to have this dream, if he had to place a known body under Lou, a pair of familiar legs wrapped around his hips, at least Nikki had been spared. In spite of all that passed between them, the sinkhole of his imagination had not yet pulled her under.

  TWELVE

  Years earlier, when Derek’s circle of acquaintances had been wider, somebody was always in crisis, usually in the fallout of a romantic disaster. It was hardly worth remarking on. The cure was much boozing and brooding, and a bit of family time. Home to Mom and Dad’s on Sunday, where the dinner table was unchanged since childhood and roast beef with gravy piled down on the alcohol-poisoned stomach. Go see Nan and Pop, still in their old house after sixty years. Help the brother put down a hardwood floor. Off around the bay, where sturdy relatives with names like Aunt Kit and Uncle Silas endured, offering ocean air and boiled dinner.

  Eventually you came around, got laid, and went back to being a happy boozer instead of a sullen one. Family receded to the background, where it belonged.

  Now that Derek was older, depression wasn’t such a lark anymore. And the family part had never worked for him anyway. He didn’t have an Aunt Kit, didn’t keep up with the relatives he had. His grandparents were long dead. Sunday dinner with the folks was a chore. The Butts were not a communal family.

  Even now, shaken by treachery and embarrassment, they remained a guarded lot. Derek’s mother was inscrutable, silent in the passenger seat of the Escort as she and Derek approached the airport. Her hands rested in her lap, with a cigarette poised between two fingers, ready to be lit when she escaped the car. It seemed to Derek that his parents were marvellous feats of engineering, battered by life, absorbing the punishment with little visible effect. Lou wobbled occasionally. But Elizabeth showed nothing except a slightly pinched look in her eyes, as if trying to see in the dark.

  Tax
is lined up eight deep at the arrivals door. Derek dropped his mother there so she could have a few puffs, and circled the parkade before finding a space at the far end. Walking back to the terminal, he took in the wide-open runways, a relief from suffocating downtown. At the edge of the terminal building his mother stood in her khakis and lavender fleece, iron-grey hair trimmed close to her bullet head, resting an elbow in a palm, smoking and looking into the horizon.

  Inside, a slew of girls in matching soccer shirts darted through the crowd. The business travellers were mostly women, striding quick enough that freshly washed hair lifted about their heads, and wheeled suitcases roared on the tile. Those awaiting arrivals were mostly men, husky men in a mix-and-match of ball caps, jeans, and sneakers. They clutched Tim Hortons cups and their mustaches twitched, as if in solidarity.

  Bodies spilled from the descending escalator—the afternoon flights were arriving all at once. Derek knew his brother at first glance, a small man by any measure, with a fine-boned face, a round helmet of thick black hair, and a sculpted beard. He might have been a Slavic refugee or New York Jew, types Derek knew only from the movies.

  Curtis scanned the crowd with a hopeful smile before catching his mother’s eye. The smile stayed firm as he weaved through the bodies, embraced his mother, and grabbed Derek’s hand.

  “Hey! Wow! Great view for the landing. The water, and the city hanging at the edge of the sea.”

  He wore a baggy woollen sweater and sharply creased dress pants, from which he took a handkerchief to dab his brow.

  “Holy jumpin’,” he said, pulling the sweater over his head. “Hot on that plane.” Underneath he wore a white T-shirt. Combined with the pants it made him look half dressed for an office job.

  As they waited at the luggage carousel, walked to the car, lined up at the parkade exit, and followed the parade to Portugal Cove Road and back into town, Curtis generated small talk with ease. After airline food, weather, and housing prices, he turned the conversation to local meat and produce. With the pride of an artisan, he said he was eager to try the lamb and engage farmers and butchers in shop talk. He understood Newfoundland lamb to be “nicely gritty with a tinge of sea salt on the palate.” He rubbed his fingers together at the lips as he said this.