Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  ‘It’s garbage day tomorrow,’ I said. She chuckled, slow, and then harder, gaining momentum until she severed it with a cough.

  ‘So?’ she said.

  ‘Did you put it out?’

  She snorted. ‘Yes, Mother. Mother dearest. Four bags, all your junk, thanks a lot. Anything else?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said.

  ‘Well, the sky hasn’t goddamn fallen since the departure of Your Excellency, but you’ll be the first to know when it does. I even remembered to feed the dog. We may just survive this, kiddo.’ Sig snorted again. ‘How was it?’

  I paused, weighed the possible answers. I could tell her about Ed.

  ‘I hit a girl,’ I said.

  About how, when he watched me play, Ed saw Kristjan’s hands and in a poof of diesel and snow the Zamboni man became my fairy godmother.

  ‘She big?’

  And I ended up there, lying in the narrowest bed I’d ever seen, in the smallest room, listening to the complaints of my muscles and Prince.

  ‘Pretty big.’

  ‘You hurt?’

  And Sig had ended up alone.

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘She hurt?’

  ‘Well, didn’t seem like it. She was spread all over the ice, though.’

  ‘Ah,’ Sig said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She got up, though?’

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘Ah. Well, no harm done, kiddo. Shake it off. All your equipment in there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’d you eat for supper?’

  ‘Bought a tuna sandwich from the food court.’

  ‘The food court – look at you, eh?’

  ‘It was pretty crappy.’

  ‘Ah. Not bad for practice anyways. What are you doing now?’

  I looked around the room. ‘Lying on my bed. My neighbour’s a nerd and he’s listening to Prince.’

  ‘Oh, hey now, you watch it, kid. You jocks. Nerds grow up to rule the world, you know, so you be nice to him. He could be prime minister one day and you’ll be in the beer leagues, Miss Big Time. Just watch it.’

  I laughed. ‘I’ll be driving the Zamboni,’ I said, and Sig snorted.

  ‘You know you are not in the beer gardens if you can hear me right now.’ The bullhorn voice echoed into the room from the hallway, sending a ripple of surprised laughter around the lecture hall. ‘You are not in the beer gardens. You are in class. I know this because I am walking down the hall, past your classroom – ’ A woman in a long skirt and Doc Marten boots walked up the stairs and closed the door with a grudging smile. This door opened into the upper atmosphere of the lecture hall, the rest of the room dropping down from where she stood like a swim-down cave, old brown seats forming walls. It had rained the night before and the smell of wet grass and mud had been carried in on the soles of sneakers and sandals. I’d chosen a seat next to the stairs, midway down, and now I sat and waited, clutching my backpack on my lap. The woman descended the stairs. Was this the professor, Dr. Hurlitzer? Based on the name, I’d pictured old and tall and square and moustached. She picked up a stack of papers from the desk in the pit of the room and looked up with a small twitch of her ponytail. She couldn’t have been more than thirty. I looked around the half-full room, wondering if I had the wrong one.

  That summer, I’d swum blindly through numbers in the course catalogue – section numbers, lab numbers, course numbers. Awkwardly trying on the descriptions. I’d talked to a career counsellor at the university. Physiotherapist, I threw out to her. This was the one Sig liked. Teacher, I also said. Biologist. Hockey coach. Each answer felt like confessing an exotic, hidden desire, but none of it seemed to surprise her. General first year, she told me, with conviction, and these words had calmed me instantly. And so: Psychology, English, Biology, History. A huge island to roam around until. That was as far as I’d gotten: until.

  ‘Okay, everyone,’ the woman said. ‘I have the syllabuses here. Dr. Hurlitzer is in Germany still, so just grab one and then you can go. She’ll be back next week. I’m the TA – my name is Morag. Any questions, I can answer them for you. Otherwise, see you next week.’

  That was it. The beginning and end of my first class and the room stirred suddenly with swooping students, flying down to the TA and her papers, then fleeing the room, syllabus in hand, back out into the sun. These moments in the classroom a minor setback to the anarchy of a beer-drenched first day.

  Student traffic swelled into a thick orbit around University Centre, a gravitational pull toward the beer gardens set up behind the building. Moon was out of town, so no tryouts that afternoon. Without the ice time to move toward, the afternoon loomed. Going back to Rez wasn’t an option. In the past couple of days leading to the start of classes, the halls had become crammed. The soundtrack of endlessly colliding schedules: relentless door slamming, muffled beating of shoes on the carpet, voices glancing off each other. A hotel of teenagers freed, completely, from the leashes of their parents’ eyes for the first time. Musk of hormones and hangovers. Students staggering down the halls in pyjamas and bedhead well into the afternoon.

  That morning, at breakfast, I’d watched Gavin as he whirled around carrying a plate of waffles like he was trying to find his bearings. Then, his spine straightening in epiphany, he made a beeline for the ice-cream dispenser and buried the waffles in a messy white heap of vanilla. That plate had filled me with dread. Oozing from the ice-cream machine’s udder: a graphic confirmation of the lawlessness I’d sensed since I arrived.

  I let myself be drawn into the pull around the periphery of University Centre and heard the beer gardens before I saw them: a denser raft of voice mingled with the jangling undertow of music and laughter. A plastic fence was strung around the area, the drinking students corralled. The fence fell into a small maze formation around the entrance like an airport security gate and students were lined up, fumbling in their bags for ID, tilting their faces toward the sun while they waited.

  I walked slowly around the edge of the fence, heading in the direction of Sam Hall because that was the only other place I could think of to go and I wanted to look like I was on my way somewhere. Maybe Pelly would be there, maybe one of the other rookies.

  I heard a long, loud laugh I recognized from the dressing room. The unmistakable, throaty laughter of Boz. I looked in its direction and saw them in the far corner of the beer gardens: Heezer, Hal, Pelly, Toad, Boz, mixed in with a circle of football players, all of them, beer in hand. Toad – knees bent, elbows jutting a competitive angle – chugged a beer against a colossal guy wearing a skull cap, head angled casually back with the plastic cup tilted perpendicular to his face. His other hand fisted on his hip, a cocky gesture toward boredom. Boz and Heezer’s mouths moved with encouragement I couldn’t hear, Hal looking on, arms crossed, a bemused smile. Pelly glanced up nervously at the blond football player next to her. She looked like a toy he could pick up and carry under his arm. When Toad spiked her cup to the ground, Heezer howled with victory and the blond guy picked her up by the waist and flung her over his shoulder, Heezer shrieking and pummelling him on the back with her palms. Toad’s competitor flung his cup on the ground with an exaggerated twitch of his wrist and then turned his back on the circle and began to walk away, a slow, loping stride like he was in a rap video limping to the beat.

  I recognized the football player from the gym. We’d done a team workout the day before – circuits in the Gritty Grotto, the gym in the bowels of the Phys. Ed. building. A sprawling, low-ceilinged space you descended into, the sweat-bloated air pulling you down. The gym was arranged in a series of concentric circles, weight machines surrounding the free weights, all lassoed by a rubber track, the track surrounded by a halo of gravel. I’d left the Grotto with a taste in my mouth like I’d been eating chalk.

  Here, the Gritty Grotto, was where the teams all roamed, different herds mingling in their Scarlet athletic gear. A marked division of species. The giraffe pack of the women’s volleyball team, high p
onytails and black spandex shorts. The men’s hockey team: a lean, shaggy-haired, baseball-capped pack of wolves, their smooth strides. The bearish football players, vibrating size, confident in their tattooed bulk. I lay on my back next to Pelly on a mat that smelled of socks, resting between sets of crunches, and watched a group of football players collide with Boz, Heezer and Toad, who were on their way to squats. Heezer and Toad had a Tweedledee and Tweedledum thing going in their workout gear, both wearing knee-high sweat socks with stripes around the top – Heezer’s blue, Toad’s red – and matching black shorts with the Scarlet symbol on the thigh and the word Hockey sprawled in bold across the butt. Toad had snorted at Heezer in the shorts as she followed her out of the dressing room, swigging from a water bottle.

  ‘I love how the shorts announce our junk in the trunk. Like everyone can’t tell what we play, come on. Yeah, we’re fucking gymnasts. Look at us. You know what they should have? One of those alarms built in like garbage trucks have, you know? Like every time we back up the shorts go BEEP ... BEEP ... BEEP. Warning. Junk in reverse.’

  The two groups, football and hockey, collided in high-fives, the beer-chugging football player greeting them all as Tough Bruce, holding his palm down low for them to slap in succession.

  To Heezer: ‘Tough Bruce, what’s up.’ Slap. To Toad: ‘Tough Bruce, pleasure as always.’ Slap. ‘DariUS!’ Toad barked. To Boz: ‘Looking fine, Tough Bruce. Touch it out, sister.’

  The armholes of the football players’ T-shirts had frayed edges where they’d ripped off the sleeves. The teams separated, football to bench press, hockey to squats, and Pelly and I started the crunches again.

  Of course they wouldn’t be at the rink on their day off. Of course they’d be there, drinking beer in the sun. But it was strange seeing them outside the dressing room, away from the ice, the gym, away from Sam Hall. Seeing Hal there in sunglasses, her smirk behind the plastic glass of beer as she talked to Heezer, felt like seeing a teacher on a weekend at Zellers.

  I floated in the current of students, heading toward the rink. The crowd thinned out as the path emptied into the long, sheared lawn bordering the Sam Hall parking lot. Green humidity hung in the air. A bike bell behind me and then the rushing winged sound of tires grew, a quick touch of wind on my legs as Clare Segal whizzed past – ‘Heya, Iz!’ – her teeth a quick flash at her shoulder, a Metallica sticker stuck crooked on the back of her helmet. She shot into the maze of trees and buildings beside the arena. Clare was my other stall neighbour, the southerly one. She wore the daily uniform of jeans and plain T-shirts that most of the other players did, but once in a while she wore a T-shirt that said Birtle Quilting Bee, 1982 or I’d Rather be Sailing or St. Rose Pie-Eating Champion, 1994 and I’d wonder about the rest of her life outside Sam Hall.

  Quick footsteps behind me and I stepped to the side as a guy brushed up against my elbow. But then he slowed down, loosened his stride to match my own and grinned down into my face.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hello.’ I made my face a question mark and took another step sideways. He stepped diagonally toward me again, that amused smile, like we were two-stepping.

  ‘You played hockey in Kenora – Beachview,’ he said, his dark eyes skating zigzags across my face.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Isabel.’ As though he’d been searching for a punchline and it was my name.

  ‘Uh. Yeah.’ I combed his face for a thread of memory. Dark hair, eyes. The scar on his upper lip. Nothing.

  ‘I played Peewee with you a couple of years. Jacob. Copenace.’

  ‘Oh, um, did you go to Beachview? Elementary?’

  ‘I came in from Redbear. The reserve.’ His smile curling the scar up into a crescent.

  A round kid, swollen cheeks, wisps of hair glued damp on his forehead. Crying as his feet thawed after outdoor practice, that burn that follows numbness, the cruel trick. No sound, but steady streams of tears down his cheeks. His parents whispered to him, their voices like Buck’s brother-in-law, Uncle Noah, the S that continued after the word was done. His dad removed his shoulder pads, pulled his arms through a winter jacket; his mom rubbed his curled feet. They arrived in a long van filled with relatives. Colourful jackets, long leather mitts with beads that winked under the fluorescent lights in the stands.

  ‘You look different,’ I said.

  ‘I was fat.’ A fact, unapologetic. ‘You’re playing hockey here now? I saw you in the rink the other day.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, trying out. You know. They invited me to.’

  ‘That’s wicked, Isabel. Wicked. Congratulations.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, the padded plush of fingertips through my T-shirt, sincerity etched in the crow’s feet beside his eyes, and my shoulder steadied itself under his grasp for a moment, then dropped like the wing of a plane. ‘Second year for me now. It’s a good place to be. You in Rez?’

  ‘McMurtry.’

  ‘Ah, I was there last year. I’m in St. Mark’s now. How do you like it?’ He caught a leaf in the air, a fluid swipe of his palm, and twirled it between a thumb and forefinger.

  ‘It’s not bad.’ A siren wailed behind us, the sound sifting through distance until it was small.

  ‘There’s a lot more of that,’ I added.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Noise.’

  ‘Yeah. In Redbear I can hear my grandmother sneezing down the street every morning.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Seriously, I can. Every morning, three sneezes. Good projection.’ Jacob smiled, laid the leaf in his palm.

  ‘Hey.’ He turned to me like he’d just remembered something. ‘We should go for a skate sometime. You know, like the old days.’

  I teetered on the edge of this suggestion. Sudden fear licking the back of my neck.

  ‘Well, I guess we both live at the same rink now, so.’ I laughed like a girl.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he said, leaning down. I felt wedged in by his teeth.

  ‘Skating.’ That fake laugh again. I’d just invented it and now wanted to send it into extinction.

  ‘With me?’

  ‘With the team.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘Are you trying out for the women’s team too?’ I tried to throw my eyebrows at him.

  ‘I wish.’

  I shrugged, struggling to keep my feet under me. The conversation was too fast.

  ‘We should have a coffee,’ he said. ‘You know, we K-towners gotta keep the spirit alive here. Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t drink coffee.’ True.

  Jacob stopped in his tracks and tilted back his head, his laughter low and smooth. I looked at him over my shoulder, kept walking.

  ‘You’re giving me a workout, eh?’ he said, catching up to me. ‘Going for coffee – it’s like a metaphor, you know?’

  ‘A metaphor for what?’

  ‘Well, for lots of stuff.’ A stretch of silence. I didn’t know where I was going.

  ‘Anyways, if you don’t drink coffee now, you will soon,’ Jacob said. ‘Believe me. Morning practice. Vats of it in the dining hall. You’ll get hooked.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘Nope.’

  We both paused. I hadn’t meant to say it like that.

  ‘Okay, maybe you won’t,’ Jacob said finally. ‘Okay. I can tell – you’re a woman with willpower. Balls of steel.’

  He called me a woman.

  ‘So, tomorrow, then?’ he said.

  ‘Tomorrow what?’

  ‘Coffee.’

  I looked at his face, the slant of kid’s eyes I’d caught. ‘How did you recognize me?’ I asked.

  He tilted his head to the side, slightly.

  ‘You look the same,’ he said. ‘I remember, that second year, you started to have your own change room. You were so small. I thought you might be lonely.’

  While the liver hissed in the frying pan, filling the house with the smell of cooked blood, two people won brand-new cars.
First, the blond trollop whose laughter sounded like a baby bird plummeting from a nest to its death on the ground. Then the college boy with the crewcut and gold chains and abuse of the thumbs-up sign, who, when Bob Barker asked his name, bent so he was practically eating the microphone and screamed, ‘Eagles rule!,’ triggering a small uprising in the back row of the studio audience, visibly drunk hooligans in matching college sweatshirts, each with a huge red hole in his face where a civilized mouth should have been. When the boy opened the door to that brand-new car and stepped in, screaming non-language into Bob Barker’s extended microphone, a dark cloud gathered above Sig’s dinner plate, throwing a shadow over the gelatinous patch of liver, over the pea rubble, and when she chewed the food and swallowed, this darkness slid down into her stomach.

  She threw a chunk of liver to Jack, resident golden retriever, then pushed her plate to the edge of the TV table and tallied a list of all the people she knew who deserved brand-new cars above these idiots. She saw Iz popping the trunk, throwing in her hockey gear, picking up a couple of teammates on the way to a game, music pouring golden from the CD player onto their laps, the car’s shining red curves articulating the shape of their laughter. The college boy brayed, voice cracking. Sig slammed her thumb into the remote and threw it to the ground and the TV inhaled all the bright flares of voices and laughter and applause and held them there in its dark, obstinate stomach, and the house caved in on her once again.

  Dwarfed in Buck’s armchair, the sky still dribbling dirty light through the window, Sig fell asleep because, she thought angrily as she let herself drift away – up toward the ceiling spangled with brand-new cars and Iz and all the negative space surrounding a slab of lonely liver – this is what old people do.

  Hot chocolate with whipped cream, not coffee. From the Tim Hortons in the food court. Jacob drank his coffee black and tall, and when he ordered it, speaking this language of coffee, he became instantly older.

  He needed a textbook. I followed him to the Used Book Store, in one of the tunnels that spread like roots beneath the campus, where he said everyone fled in the winter.

  ‘Rocks for jocks,’ he said, holding up a textbook in the geology section, the two of us small among the shelves of books, yellow Used stickers crooked vaccinations on dulled spines. ‘And it’s kinda sad, but it really is that. It’s obscene. Back row’s all football and about five of us hockey guys wanted to take it together, so we’re all there. A couple of the basketball guys. You know, no one’ll ever show anyway, so.’ He snorted, flipped through the book, put it back. Picked up another.