Homesick

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  The storms frequently interfered with television signals and the reception of the movie matinee. While the lightning clashed apocalyptically overhead there were arguments about unplugging the set.

  “Yeah, if we unplug the set now I’ll never find out what happens. Just wait a minute. The movie’s almost over.”

  “It’s over now. That goddamn aerial on the roof is no better than a lightning rod, it’ll suck the juice right out of the sky and down into the set. That’s an RCA there and I don’t want the sonofabitch fried. Unplug it.”

  “What if the aerial gets hit while I’m unplugging the set? Who gets fried then?”

  “If you’re worried, wear my rubber boots. Come on, quit stalling. Just unplug the sonofabitch.”

  Staring intently at the screen, doggedly delaying. “You unplug it.”

  “You want me to shut that set down for the Olympics? That what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Then unplug it. Now.”

  Daniel slouched sullenly to the TV. “Jesus.”

  It was a potent threat. For weeks Daniel had been anticipating the Games. Growing more and more excited as publicity and news coverage built, he was given to lecturing his grandfather, passing on with an air of sublime self-importance whatever information he had managed to glean from studies of Sport and Sports Illustrated in the magazine rack of the drugstore. It was a premeditated attempt to arouse interest in his grandfather so he wouldn’t balk at watching a bunch of foreigners competing in sports he didn’t understand and probably hadn’t even heard of. Perhaps it worked because when the Olympics finally began the old man proved to be a quick sell. He was easily as enthusiastic as his grandson, maybe more so.

  For the duration of the Games their routine altered and their days rearranged themselves around the broadcast of Olympic reports. Alec greedily immersed himself in the spectacle, even insisting on watching events that Daniel had trouble considering sports at all: dressage, field hockey, European handball, race-walking, to name a few. The sorts of activities which communists excelled at, but which no self-respecting North American athlete would be caught dead doing. Daniel thought that any sport which required a man to wear tights wasn’t a sport at all and as for race-walking, that was a comedy routine.

  To make matters worse, his grandfather liked to enliven their viewing by cheering for the Iron Curtain countries. Daniel knew what he was up to, but being a Russian-hater he couldn’t help getting hot under the collar when the East bloc won and was applauded by the old man. Just once he wanted to get under his skin the way his grandfather got under his. He tried. Rome was not the only scene of fierce Olympic competition. Daniel had something disparaging to say about every Soviet success.

  “There goes another Ivan to get his medal for being best at some pukey sport played by about four people in the whole world. And of the other three who play the dumb sport, likely two of them are Russian anyway.”

  “Magnificent athletes, the Russians,” said his grandfather.

  “Whoever heard of this stuff? European handball, for chrissakes. That’s a game? And why do we have to play their sports and they don’t have to play ours? How come no baseball or football? I’d like to see how they’d do having to play a real game like baseball or football. Then we’d see.”

  “Oh,” said his grandfather with maddening calmness, “give them a year or two of practice and they’d master that the way they’ve mastered everything else. Magnificent athletes, the Russians.”

  They only struck a truce when it came to cheering for the Italians and Canadians; then they found themselves temporarily in the same camp. Both were downcast when Harry Jerome of Canada cramped in the semi-finals of the one hundred metres and had to hobble pitifully off the track. After that happened, despite his protestations of admiration for the Russians, the old man only really cared about the Italians. He liked the way Italians wore their hearts on their sleeves, without excuses, like kids, weeping at a loss, exulting in a victory. He even forgot his fellow-traveller pose in the welter-weight boxing final, cheering Giovanni Benvenuti’s win over the Russian Radonyak. When Berruti won the two hundred metres, stylishly insolent in sunglasses, Alec was delighted by the sight of the ecstatic Roman crowd lighting newspapers in the stands and waving them aloft to salute their hero. “Look at those crazy Italian buggers,” he said, shaking his head at the carnival, “having themselves a time like a bunch of kids.”

  Today they are watching Olympic officials in white suits and white fedoras sort and organize runners for the marathon. Alec has never heard of a marathon and Daniel is passing on to him whatever he has learned from his reading of Sports Illustrated. He speaks reverently of Emil Zátopek, most famous previous winner of the 26 mile, 385 yard race. At first his grandfather refuses to believe it possible, that human beings could, or would, run such a distance, but Daniel keeps assuring him that it is true, that the spare, sinewy men with hollowed cheeks who are nervously shuffling their feet and prancing on the spot are prepared to race each other over all those punishing miles.

  “This I’ve got to see,” says Alec in disbelief. “Why, that’s further than Hyacinth,” he remarks, naming a town down the line. “And why 26 miles and 385 yards? Why those extra yards? Is it because somebody once survived the 26 miles and they needed those 385 yards to finish him off? If you wanted to race horses that far the SPCA would have you up on cruelty to animal charges.”

  The announcer seems to view the race in a similar light. His preamble is full of words like pain, courage, suffering, endurance. He speaks of a marathoner arriving at that stage in a race when the body’s resources are utterly depleted and the runner’s muscles, sapped, function on will alone. As he talks, the cameras sweep over the drawn, anxious faces of the race favourites, pausing briefly for a moment to dwell on an oddity, a slight, grave black man who, it is announced, has inexplicably chosen to run the marathon in bare feet. The announcer states his opinion that no matter how unaccustomed to footwear this primitive African might be – an Ethiopian in Emperor Haile Selassie’s bodyguard named Abebe Bikila – he is making a serious miscalculation choosing to run barefoot. The cobble-stoned streets of Rome that make up part of the route will be considerably less forgiving to his feet than the highland meadows around Addis Ababa where he is accustomed to train.

  Yet at the six and a half mile mark of the race the Ethiopian can be found in the leading group of runners. Monkman can’t believe their pace and predicts they’ll never maintain it. “They’ll never hold it,” he says, “never.” Six miles further on Rhadi the Moroccan and the barefoot Ethiopian surge away from the pack, Rhadi in front and Bikila poised at his shoulder, running relentlessly and mechanically like a wind-up toy, bringing Daniel and his grandfather to the edge of their seats, leaning forward toward the screen. The elapsed time is announced as sixty-two minutes, thirty-nine seconds and his grandfather excitedly urges Daniel to find a pencil and paper and compute exactly how fast the two leaders are running. Daniel has never seen him this excited, crouched in his chair, hands rubbing his kneecaps, eyes welded to the television and its fleeting figures, the old man is utterly enthralled by the drama. Before Daniel completes his calculation the television reports that Rhadi and Bikila are covering one mile approximately every five minutes.

  “That can’t be right. Is that right?” his grandfather demands without shifting his eyes from the TV.

  Daniel gives a flick of the pencil on the sheet of paper and confirms it. “Yes,” he says, “that’s about right.”

  “How do they keep going?” asks the old man softly.

  At the twenty-two-mile mark Bikila spurts past the Moroccan bringing Alec out of his chair and onto his feet. Alec jabs a forefinger at the figure on the television, pumps his shoulder, “Run you black bastard!” he exults. “Run!” Stabbing his finger at the runner on the screen as if it were a prod. Daniel glances up at his grandfather and feels a slight alarm. Alec, swaying, has to reach out and steady himself with the chair back. The old man’s
eyes are burning.

  Now the Ethiopian is in first place and Rhadi pursuing. The camera fixes on the rigid, determined mask of Bikila’s face, sweeps down for a shot of naked feet skimming above and whispering on the pavement. Twilight lowers on the city and the little man forges on through the waning light, seemingly blind to the cheering crowds thickening along the race route. He looks to neither side, refuses blueberry juice and glucose offered from a refreshment station, simply runs on. The old man knows this is proper, this is how it must be. Bare feet and unslaked thirst.

  Alec wishes he could watch the black man run forever. But Abebe crosses the finish line and the spell is broken. Then it is over for both of them. Bikila waves away the blanket race officials press on him. This too seems correct to Alec. As the tension drains from his body Bikila begins to laugh, then suddenly his laughter becomes tears and he weeps like a broken man. Monkman feels his own eyes filling. The winning time, two hours, fifteen minutes, sixteen and two-tenths seconds, is announced. The old man asks Daniel to write it down for him, carefully folds the paper the boy gives him, and slips it into his wallet, declaring to Daniel that he ought to remember this moment, they’ve just seen the toughest man in all the Olympics.

  Daniel, desiring to get his own back for the Russians, says that is ridiculous. Come on, tougher than the boxers?

  But the old man doesn’t trouble to answer his challenge. He seems to have slipped off in one of his trances again, wallet lying open in his lap.

  In September the Games ended, leaving behind a legacy. Daniel got the idea he would turn himself into a distance runner. He had never been much good at sports but distance running appeared to him mostly a matter of training and will. All that was necessary was to harden his body until it was capable of stubbornly doing its duty. Maybe he couldn’t run fast but he might learn to run hard and long, harder and longer than the talented ones who hit and caught balls effortlessly. Best of all, he could learn to do this in secret, on his own. He took a grim, sweet delight pushing his body until it hurt and thinking of spring and track season and the surprise he would have in store for them all then. It was like a story in a boys’ book, he imagined the end of the race and Biff or Todd, somebody with that kind of name, somebody who hadn’t thought him much at all, coming up to congratulate him, saying “I didn’t think you had it in you. But say, Danny, you’re all right!”

  Daniel had no real idea how to train. He simply laid out a course and, each time he ran it, tried to run it faster than the last time. Afraid of being seen and laughed at, he waited until dusk to train and took an added precaution. He ran in blue jeans rather than shorts, so if anyone noticed him he would not be a runner – only a boy happening to run.

  Alec became his timer. Each night when twilight fell his grandfather packed his captain’s chair out onto the front lawn and settled himself into it with his wristwatch nestled in his palm. Daniel had asked him if it was necessary to make himself so conspicuous but the old man said, Yes, it was. If Daniel wanted an accurate timing the timer had to be exactly flush with the finish line which was the north corner of the house. He needn’t think he was going to wait on him standing, not with his legs. Consider his age.

  They estimated the route to be approximately three miles. The highway which led west out of Connaught made the first side of the loop and if Daniel encountered a car approaching there, he slowed to a walk as soon as the headlights picked him up. When the car passed, he resumed running. At first he hadn’t bothered to slacken his pace when he met a vehicle but this had caused people to stop their cars and ask, Did he need assistance, had there been an accident? Answering such inquiries had been embarrassing so now he went along at a jerky, impatient walk until the coast was clear again.

  A mile outside of town a grid road crossed the highway and Daniel turned left onto it. His passage down this deserted stretch of road launched a flock of mallards from a slough and flung them in relief against the sky, stroking their way across the cool, impassive disc of the risen moon. Ahead he could see the railway crossing sign standing stark before a pale horizon floating above darker, settled earth. Daniel always returned home on the railway embankment. Cinders made for a difficult footing. Panting, he slipped and lurched, torturing ankles and shins, but on the embankment there was no traffic to contend with and at this point in his run he knew that if he was forced to walk he would never be able to pick up the pace again. So he slogged on resolutely to the beads of glowing lights which spelled Connaught, and when he reached the first streetlight swerved abruptly down from the embankment, plunged recklessly down the slope in a rattle of cinders, and sped across the brightly illuminated street into the shielding darkness of the alley running behind the main street.

  It was full dark at present, the shade had come down upon the window. His breath sawed rustily in his chest, his sneakers slapped noisily in the narrow passage. He ran unheeding past where the yellow brick wall carved with his uncle’s name stood obscured in darkness.

  Bursting out of the throat of the alley into his grandfather’s street he knew he had only two more blocks to go. Nothing must be held back, kept in reserve now. His mouth hung slack and loose, rhythmically gasping with each jolt of his legs.

  The old man waits for his grandson in the chair. He holds a flashlight on the face of the wristwatch. While waiting he thinks about the black man and the endless race. He remembers best when the black man ran entirely alone. It grew dark and soldiers lit his way, holding flaming torches in upraised hands, high above their heads. The black man went deaf past the cheering crowds, sightless past the Roman ruins, the ancient broken walls, the carved gravestones, the headless, armless statues. The torches flickered and smoked, the flames nodded and bent in his draught as he went past, blind or indifferent to the women in dark, shapeless clothes who knelt and crossed themselves to ward off suffering as it crossed their path.

  19

  What’s the point? Vera sometimes asks herself when she feels most discouraged and neglected. Why not just stop in bed, pull the covers over my head, and let the damn kid have his wish and roll into hell on a handcart. Because without me watching him he’ll betray all that is finest in him, all that he inherited of Stanley’s nature. Let him slap me in the face if he cares to, but not his father. Not Stanley.

  You tell yourself it’s just a stage he’s in and not really personal. After twelve or thirteen years of living something happens in a kid’s head – all of a sudden there’s not another soul in the universe to consider but himself. Might be I was the same, although I can’t remember it was so long ago.

  What would he miss first, me or dinner? Didn’t Stutz look the other day when I said, “If I was lying dead on the floor between him and the TV I swear he’d vault over the corpse to switch it on and never turn a hair.” “Now Vera,” said Stutz.

  That goddamn television. It’s all I heard about all blessed summer. TV, TV, TV. Always with the complaining how he was so hard done by to have to go without. Again the only soul in the universe. Quite the performance seeing as he wasn’t missing much of it sitting over at the old fellow’s every afternoon, staring at the screen. I’m proud of myself that I never so much as dropped a hint I knew – which wasn’t an easy thing to do with him giving himself away every time he opened his mouth. Right under my nose arguing with Stutz as to which was the better program, Tennessee Ernie’s or “Peter Gunn.” Wasn’t I sorely tempted to put him the question: “How is it you’re the big expert on Peter Gunn when we don’t own a television to watch it on?” But I didn’t.

  And I didn’t buy the television to compete with anybody either. That wasn’t it at all. In any case, trying to keep him away from that old bugger is like trying to keep a wasp out of jam. Try too hard and you’re liable to get stung.

  A sensible person would have given the television money to Stutz against the loan, but you think, What the hell have I been able to give the kid in the last ten years? Food and clothes and me, which strictly speaking doesn’t add up to entertainment.
And figuring we practically live in The Bluebird, where else would I put it except here? Naturally, Daniel would prefer to have it at home. Now why’s that? Because if he claims to be watching television at home, how am I to know if he is or not, with him there and me here? He and the old charmer could be sitting thick as thieves and me without a clue, an inkling. Not on your life, Mother Brown.

  What I’d like to say to Daniel is this: Don’t go making the mistake of thinking you’re something special to him. Everybody’s had their turn at that – me, Earl – and what did it ever come to? He’s old and there’s nobody else for him but you because the rest of us ran away to save whatever we could before he’d used us all up. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on my worst enemy, let alone you. So don’t flatter yourself when you’re no more than a convenience.

  The trouble with truth is it’s cruel. That’s why nobody can bring themselves to tell it and I can’t neither. He’s never heard the word convenience out of my mouth.

  And then he has the gall to tell me I never bought the television for him anyway. No, I bought it for myself and for the customers. “We wouldn’t have got a TV,” he says, “if Kennedy wasn’t running for president. And the reason you set it up in The Bluebird was so you could see him every night on the six o’clock news. And now those dumb Portuguese couldn’t live without watching ‘The Roy Rogers Show’ five nights a week while they wait for their supper. If you moved it out now, they’d riot.”

  The resentment in his voice when he said that, where’d it come from? Patience is supposed to be the cure for what ails them, so I was patient. Didn’t I explain how, this being an election year in the U.S., a person could learn a lot about world affairs watching the news and hearing the candidates discuss the issues? Kind of a practical education. “You’re getting to an age where you ought to be paying attention to these sorts of things. They’re talking about your future,” I told him.