You Could Believe in Nothing

by Jamie Fitzpatrick

  “So you tracked this down because it’s the start of the family?”

  “Yeah. Dad talked about Bobby Hull a lot.”

  “I thought you might know the difference by now.”

  “What difference?”

  “Well, you already know…For starters, your father omitted a few details about this night.” Another long slurp, then a series of quick sips, the steam from the mug wetting the creases in his forehead. “Ah, shit. Look, I didn’t fly across the country to heap this on you.”

  He laid his mug on the floor and lifted his hands.

  The most important thing to understand, said Curtis, was that Lou and Elizabeth did not go to Detroit as a couple. Yes, they were engaged. But it all came apart. Elizabeth Fonteyne skipped town, arriving in Detroit alone to be reunited with her boy and with John Ogilvie. Curtis narrated this tale with shining eyes, and Derek wondered how often he had played the scene in his head.

  “We tried to be a family,” he said. “I remember her at breakfast. The three of us. Coffee, orange juice, and a stack of pancakes. I remember it clear as a bell.”

  How many times in the last few weeks had Derek sat listening while somebody stuck daggers into the things he thought he knew? The progress of his anxiety was becoming routine. First the oily, trickling sensation in his stomach, then the sweat, followed by the stiffening muscles and some kind of attack on the groin.

  Curtis sat erect, his preacher-man persona giving his story a moralizing, loaves-and-fishes quality. He was dialling up the drama now. There was no doubt whatsoever, he said, no doubt that John and Elizabeth loved one another. How long did their domestic idyll last? Weeks, perhaps months. These are moments of memory, after all, stretched and amplified in the mind of a seven-year-old boy. Then Lou appeared, a stranger out of the blue.

  At this point, Derek saw his brother literally taken aback, with a jerk of the head and his eyes widening to convey a child’s bewilderment. The full performance.

  Was Lou Butt summoned to Detroit, or had he taken the initiative and set out to get his girl back? Curtis couldn’t say. But there he was, a strange man from Newfoundland.

  “You know the rest.”

  Derek felt an inner collapse, as if a structure above and behind his testicles had caved in on itself.

  “So she runs across the country,” Derek said. “Trading one man for another. Then she changes her mind again?”

  Curtis was dangling the mug beneath his chin again.

  “I can only assume that things in Detroit didn’t work out for them. My father wasn’t that easy to live with. Spent most of his life alone. A bit of a drifter, you know? A different kind of cat, as they say.”

  Not unlike yourself, thought Derek. But he didn’t say it. He didn’t want to upset the balance of the conversation, which felt like a high-wire act.

  “Where did you get all this, Curtis?”

  “I pieced it together when I was a teenager. I was obsessed with it for a while, figured if I had enough information I could sabotage the family. Tear it apart. I’m not proud of that, obviously.”

  “Did you ever get into it with Mom?”

  “I confronted them both. They denied it, told me to never mention it to anybody. Lou called me a son of a bitch, told me to get out of the house. It was a bad scene. Mom crying.” He shook his head. “That’s when I left home. Not a happy memory, obviously. But I try to focus on redemption. Redemption is a life journey.”

  While his brother was violating the family foundation myth, Derek had resisted the impulse to meet his eye. He watched the game instead, half expecting it to produce some telling detail that would discredit Curtis and his version of history. All he saw was a balding winger making a bowlegged defenseman look bad, scrabbling around him and cutting across the net for an easy goal. A close-up shot captured the bald man in a gummy, toothless grin. It all looked comically inept.

  Curtis sat forward and raised two fists in front of him, like he was admonishing the television.

  “You’re right about one thing,” he said. “By the time we went to that hockey game, Mom had made her choice. So I guess that’s the night this family began. But it didn’t begin in quite the way you imagined.”

  Derek flushed the toilet and rubbed his eyes, and cursed the dark, wet vein he had dripped down his left pant leg. He returned to the bedroom and the computer, where he had already kicked over the beer at his feet.

  Deleting spam had left him with one lengthy, garbled email from Sully.

  You see how Gordie HOWE is pre-modern - making open spaces smaller (ie: frozen river) and his skills recreate those spaces within confinemnet of enclosed spaces (ie: rink)

  HULL is total opposite. Straight ahead, destroy restraint. this requires violating traditions, structure, history, ect. This is seen in his career bio - refusal of accepted norms and rules. Bobbys game needs EXTREME EMOTION for better or woirse. This is also at work in his personal life.

  Also, you can see that the HULL game is big NOT subtle - perfect for the image world created by TV and distancing of camera. My husband worked in TV many years and has definite views on this.

  Husband? Derek tried to remake Sully as a woman, but could only manage a more androgynous version of the puffy recluse he had always pictured.

  A fist against the front door echoed in the hallway below. Derek lifted a plastic tab of the window blind and looked down. The square shoulders and crimson tangle of hair could only be Kelly. He watched while she pulled out her cellphone and poked it. As she brought it to her ear, Derek’s phone trilled on the bedside table.

  “You’re home, right?” said Kelly.

  “Upstairs, yeah.”

  “Please answer the door. I need you to.”

  Derek laid the phone on the windowsill. Kelly stood with her arms wrapped at her chest. Not shivering or moving at all. He regarded her for a few seconds before heading down.

  “I’ve just left Mom’s. She’s moving tomorrow, but the home won’t have her room ready until the afternoon.” She said all this while following him into the kitchen. “Bill had another racket with them. I had a racket with Bill. He’s staying over with Mom tonight.”

  “Why him and not you?”

  “Don’t ask.” She waved a hand and looked around the bright kitchen. After putting Curtis in a cab, Derek had cleared everything away in a fit of nervous energy.

  “I think I might be sick,” said Kelly. She wrestled out of her jacket, letting it fall to the floor. “I think I need to lie down.”

  She looked okay, he thought. But her clothes were all wrong. The jeans bunched around her hips. Her tummy strained a form-fitting white blouse, opening gaps between the buttons and spilling over the waistband like a bumper separating her top and bottom halves.

  He led her up the stairs and she sat on Nicole’s side of the bed. He went to the other side and dimmed the lamp.

  “Do you need the toilet?” he asked. She hunched over her knees and held up a hand like a traffic cop.

  Derek waited for her laboured breathing to ease, then sat beside her. She lifted her feet one at a time and removed her black socks, peeling them from the top so they turned inside out.

  “I’ve just heard the strangest story,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Apparently, when my parents got married, Mom was in love with someone else.”

  Kelly looked at him for a moment, then stood and pushed her jeans to her ankles, kicking them away to free her feet. A thumb reached back and hooked inside her underwear, pulling the fabric even. The veins down the backs of her legs were ghostly blue in the lamplight. She sat down again.

  “And who told you that?”

  “Curtis. The someone else was his father.”

  “He might be full of shit. You always said he was trouble.”

  Derek wrinkled his nose at this. Still in the ill-fitting whit
e blouse, Kelly reached for the covers. Derek shifted so she could turn down the bed and climb in, lying on her side and pulling her knees into a tuck. She fixed the covers around her.

  “Everyone has their romantic misadventures,” she said. “It’s not something you tell your kids about. God knows there’s plenty of details I’ll never share with Sebastian.”

  Curtis had departed with soothing words about betrayal giving way to forgiveness. As the taxi pulled up, horn blaring, he apologized for the “hard truth” before scuttling down the steps. But Derek saw the glint in his eye. Angry young Curtis was still in there somewhere, with his leering grin and disaffected swagger, relishing his judgment of Lou and Elizabeth’s marriage as a shoddy substitute for what should have been.

  As much as he wished to, Derek couldn’t dismiss his half-brother's reading of events. It rang with a forlorn plausibility that was missing from his own account, with its foolish investment in an old hockey hero, as if Bobby Hull were a deity, directing Butt fortunes from on high. The Curtis story was consistent with the family they all knew, its collision of longings, delusions, gambits, and the unnamed force that keeps people shuffling through life, regardless of purpose or destination.

  But how could such a delicious secret endure in hermitic, backbiting St. John’s? Maybe it was no secret at all, just an open scandal Derek’s parents had weathered and finally turned from. Maybe that explained why Derek and Cynthia had known so little of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the rest. Lou and Elizabeth had been exiled, or had decided to throw off the yoke of family, fearing it would strangle them.

  “I have to make a call,” said Derek.

  “I’m sorry. Should I leave you alone?”

  “No.” He patted her leg. “Relax.”

  He went to the bathroom and closed the door without turning on the light. Pulling Sarah’s card from his pocket, he leaned into the street light to read the number. His thumb was shaking, and couldn’t nail the “5” at the centre of the keypad. So he placed the phone on the sink and dried his palms on his legs, then steadied the phone with one hand while he picked out the digits with a finger.

  “Hello?”

  “Are you still in St. John’s?”

  “I told you I don’t fly out until Friday.”

  “I’m in,” said Derek. “If she comes home, I’m in.”

  “Are you drunk?” asked Sarah.

  “A little.”

  “I better call you tomorrow to make sure you mean it.”

  “I mean it. What about Nikki?”

  “She cares about you a lot more than you realize.”

  “She’s got a funny way of showing it.”

  “Get used to it.”

  Derek was watching the window across the street, again imagining a half-dressed woman entering the bright square to examine herself in the bathroom mirror. No such creature lived over there, and he already had a half-dressed woman warming the bed. But there was no accounting for fantasy.

  “Tell her not to quit the job in Ottawa,” said Derek. “Not yet.”

  “I’m going to call you tomorrow morning,” said Sarah. “I need you to be sober about this. Will I get you at this number?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The bed covers rose and fell in time with Kelly’s even, whistling breath. Could she be asleep, just like that?

  Derek saw how her hair had faded around the temples, losing the lustre it had in her twenties. There was nothing strange about having her in his bed, as if the last fifteen years hadn’t happened.

  With its pretensions stripped away, the past was a small place. Black and white heroes slowed by bulky leather skates and sweat-drenched wool. A newly married couple with an unhappy boy. Disappointed women returning to old beds. Tired music.

  He turned off the lamp and lay back on the pillow, looked around the room, picking up shapes and patterns in the dark. Whatever the future held, it was time to move on, get the fuck out of this place. It didn’t matter what happened in this room anymore.

  FOURTEEN

  The power ballad reigned over Derek’s puberty, great, cascading songs that closed every high school dance, filling the spaces where sex didn’t happen. Synthesizers heaved and guitars cried, bearing down on the teenaged imagination as couples swayed on the cafeteria floor like stalks of corn. Even the stoners and metalheads, slouched against the wall in high-minded contempt, could not deny the lump rising in the throat when the final chorus arrived, drums pounding in hormonal agony.

  On graduation night, when all hands went out to Motion Beach to get pissed, Derek watched a ring of girls come together at the water’s edge. He watched from a rock, where he had reclined to take in the Milky Way. They stood arm in arm, tipped their heads back, and raised a drunken adolescent wail:

  I need a truu-uue heart,

  To hold me and console me,

  When my will is gone,

  Feel I can’t go on,

  Please be my truuuu-uuue heart.

  Seeing them sway and sing, a boy might believe he really did know what it was like to need someone, to be weary, to have lost the will to go on. But Derek was eighteen years old. He didn’t know any of these things.

  Riding the escalator from food court to provincial court, his ear picked up the melody somewhere overhead. The singing girls returned, their denim asses catching the first hint of dawn and the ocean lapping at their feet. But the song did not wash over him or hint at the depths of female yearning, as it had two decades before. It hung thin in the rafters of Atlantic Place and disappeared altogether as the escalator deposited the family at the top floor.

  Gerry Joseph was waiting in the lobby, which closed around them like a canvas tent on a hot August morning.

  “Trouble with the air system today,” said Gerry. “We’re plenty early.”

  Poked away in a windowless corner of an office building, provincial court was featureless by design—grey, brown, and beige, sparsely furnished, buzzing with wobbly fluorescent light. It deflated anyone anticipating the grandeur of a real courthouse.

  The lawyer flapped a sheaf of papers under his chin and indicated a wooden bench, with its full-frontal display. They remained standing instead, in a closed circle at first, then drifting about the room. Derek and his father were in jacket and tie, Lou already tugging at his waistband and reaching in to vent his armpits, sweat shining on his upper lip. Curtis had to be roasting in his sweater, especially because, at his mother’s request, he had thrown one of Lou’s sport coats over it for a more dignified look.

  Gerry Joseph took Derek by a shirt sleeve.

  “You’re all squared away, then?”

  “Yeah,” said Derek. “I think so.”

  Citing Allan Marleau’s lawyer as a “close, personal friend,” Gerry had worked out the settlement. Derek paid for the camera, added three hundred dollars for new glasses; Allan dropped the complaint. Lou was privy to the details, but the women didn’t need to know. Or Curtis.

  “Pro bono,” said Gerry.

  “Thanks,” said Derek, who felt he had been reminded of the favour often enough by now. He waited for the hand to release his sleeve. Gerry might have slept in his wrinkly brown suit. There was a grease spot on his red tie, and his wire-rimmed glasses were filthy. Gerry and Lou had been schoolmates, but Gerry always looked older. He never seemed to get a clean shave, and the wavy hair lifted from his scalp in grey strings.

  Cynthia appeared from the washroom, grooming her lips with a pinky. She wore clunky black shoes and a dark wool suit with optimistic flecks of peach.

  “Are the girls at daycare?” asked Derek.

  She shook her head. “Joey took the morning to stay home. Did you take a day off?”

  “Yeah. Annual leave.”

  She turned to join her mother, who stood at her husband’s side, perfect in a pearl blouse and silk scarf. Lou fidgeted. They didn’t touch. B
ut they usually didn’t, in public, at least.

  A couple of lawyers strode by, armed with thick black bags, laughing a little too loud at a shared joke. Derek had expected more traffic and bustle.

  Gerry Joseph turned to address a stranger, a thin man with a pronounced limp and a nylon windbreaker that hung almost to his knees.

  “Why are you here again today, Norman?”

  “I checked in with the probation, and the cops had a summons for me. Says I got to go up for the stolen car.” Norman was small, with an old face and a scattering of white stubble. He tugged on the bill of his ball cap.

  “How did you get mixed up with the car?”

  “I had nothing to do with it, Mr. Joseph. Wanda should be up for the car.”

  “You know what I told you about Wanda. She’s old enough to lead her own life, rather than cause trouble for you.”

  “I know, sir.” Norman tugged the cap again. The front of the cap said Dodge Ram Tough, and the windbreaker was stitched from bright swatches of green and blue, meant to reflect light at night.

  “She’s not still cashing your wife’s cheques, is she?” asked Gerry.

  “I told the wife to see to it. But she keeps secrets from me. They both do.”

  “Never mind secrets, Norman. They make little difference around here. Who’s appearing with you today? Is Hawco going to help you? Hawco from legal aid?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I got to go up for the car, that’s all I knows.”

  “Well, I can’t help you today, Norman. You’ll have to make out as best you can.”

  “I will, sir. Only I wish they wouldn’t keep secrets from me.”

  Norman clutched the bill of his cap and limped away, every step of the right leg pitching his shoulder sideways.

  “Mom’s sister’s crowd,” said Gerry. “Bannerman Street. You do what you can for them.”

  Derek pulled at his shirttails, which felt glued to his skin under the waistband.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Cynthia. She took his elbow and pulled him to her side.