No Signature

by William Bell

  While I looked, moving slowly from pedestal to pedestal, something was niggling at the back of my mind. On the pedestal beside each sculpture was a small white card with the name of the piece—“Hawk in Flight,” “Leaping Trout,” stuff like that—along with a date. A lot of the cards had red dots stuck on them.

  I looked over at the old man. He was watching me. He had a strange look on his face, like he was expecting something. Then it hit me. The niggling at the back of my mind.

  This was the big surprise.

  These sculptures were his.

  Random images flashed into my mind like strobe lights. Curls of cedar wood on the floor of the van. The empty work bench in the cellar of the house that told me when I was seven that the old man had left. The missing box of carving tools. The cedar shaving in the cold empty apartment on rue Mont Carmel.

  I turned my back on him, pretending to examine a carving. “Native mask” it was called. A gruesome, grimacing face showing primitive fear and confusion.

  I felt a lump in my throat and a hot glow in my chest. The old man had tricked me into coming here. I was supposed to be proud of him and his big show-and-not-tell. “Look at us,” the sculptures seemed to say, “aren’t we great?”

  I wanted to get out of there. I moved slowly toward the front entrance, but to get there I had to pass a big easel just inside the double glass doors. There was a sign on the easel: “Jack Chandler Collection”. Beside it was a sculpture on a plaster pedestal, situated so everyone coming into the gallery had to pass by it. I stepped up to it, pretending to be interested, so I could get to the door without Sharon or the old man noticing.

  One look at the sculpture and I froze. This one wasn’t a fish or bird or animal. It was larger than the others, so big you’d need two hands to lift it, and it showed something I knew about. Two men wrestling. The man being thrown was caught in mid-flight. The thrower had him in an underhook, arching his back in a perfect curve, legs bent at the knee, every muscle on his body hard and tight, bulging with the strain of lifting the helpless opponent into the air.

  A perfect Supplé.

  It was exactly like the Toronto Star photo hanging on my bedroom wall. Only better.

  The card on the pedestal read, “Father’s Pride (Not For Sale)”.

  Almost unconsciously I reached out and ran my fingers along the smooth glowing wood, my hand shaking. I turned and bolted through the glass doors, almost knocking down an old woman on her way in, and ran across the sunny parking lot toward the wide doors that led into the mall.

  REPLAY

  I was hunkered down at the edge of the mat, eyeing my opponent on the other side. He was doing knee bends, looking loose, confident. I wished I felt that way. My stomach was in a knot. My limbs tingled weakly. I stood and pulled off my sweats. The ref would be calling us to the centre of the mat any second now.

  “Give him hell, Wick,” Leonard growled. I could hardly hear him over the roar of the crowd.

  “Won’t be easy,” I said. “This guy Park has never been thrown or pinned.”

  “What? Where did you hear that? What are you talking about, never been thrown?”

  “It’s true, sir. I overheard a couple of his teammates talking a while ago.”

  Leonard laughed. “Hey, Wick, get with the program! That’s the oldest trick in the book. Those guys threw a psych on you. You’re not going to fall for that, are you?”

  The ref’s whistle shrilled. He called out our names.

  “I’ve seen this guy thrown,” Leonard added. “More than once. He isn’t even in your league.”

  I felt my confidence rushing back like a fast tide as I stepped to the centre of the mat and shook hands with Park.

  After what seemed an eternity the ref held my arm in the air. Aching all over and breathing hard, I went to my opponent’s corner to shake hands with his coach.

  “Nice work, Chandler,” he said. “You did what nobody’s done.” I must have looked confused because he added, “Jason’s never been pinned. That Supplé was magnificent.”

  NINETEEN

  ONCE INSIDE THE MALL, I stopped, not sure what to do next, not sure what I was doing there in the first place.

  It was cool and dim inside after the heat and glare of the parking lot. I walked among the shoppers, trying to get my bearings, to make some sense of everything. Once, in a wrestling match, when I was a brand-new cadet, I got thrown. I landed so hard it knocked the wind—and the sense—out of me. When I got up I was so dazed I didn’t realize the match was over. That was how I felt as I wandered past the hardware stores, clothing shops, candy and ice-cream stands. I felt tricked but I knew I hadn’t been. I was choked up by the sculpture of me that the old man had carved—who knew how long it had taken him?—but still angry with him. Mostly I felt confused.

  When I thought more about the sculptures I realized how good the old man was. You didn’t have to be an artsy-fartsy type—which I wasn’t—to see that he had tremendous talent. The sculptures were so real, but not like a perfect drawing that has no feeling to it. Those carvings were full of life, as if the person who did them had some kind of deep understanding. And the one of me, well, it showed all the things that I liked about wrestling—power, strength, agility … I don’t know, the honourableness of two guys going at each other, but with respect, in the oldest sport known to man. How had the old man done it? I thought. How had he known that?

  Another damn mystery.

  The mall’s corridor ended at a huge food store. I shoved a stray shopping cart out of my way and turned to walk back the way I had come. The big question, I realized, was even bigger now. He knew about me, knew about the photo that was framed on my wall, knew how much wrestling meant to me. And yet he was never around, not like other divorced parents who saw their kids regularly, went to their music recitals or football games and made sure they were around at Christmas. The ones kids called Sunday parents.

  Then I realized my attitude toward him had never really changed since I was seven. I was proud of him and hated him at the same time.

  I didn’t want it all dragged up again. But I wanted to know why. That was what tortured me.

  Sharon was waiting at the main doors of the mall.

  “You okay?” she asked. Her face was calm but her eyes were anxious.

  “Yeah, sure. Never been better.”

  She ignored the sarcasm. “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

  As we pulled out of the parking lot in that little hot-box of a car, Sharon said above the racket of the muffler, “Wick, mind if I ask a favour?”

  I had been staring at my hands as they twisted in my lap. I looked at her. She was watching the road.

  “What?”

  “Did you know,” she began haltingly, “did you know your dad has a drinking problem?”

  “I figured.” You didn’t have to be a genius.

  “Well, I don’t know how to say this. I mean, I’m not telling you how to act or anything, but if you could try to get along with him it would help.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault.”

  Sharon turned onto her street and shifted up through the gears. “No, Wick, I’m not saying that. Of course it isn’t. But it’s about you. And if he felt … well, better about you and him, it might help him lay off the booze.”

  “How could it be about me? I haven’t seen him or heard from him for ten years.”

  Sharon turned into her driveway. The car bumped to a stop beside the old man’s van. She looked at me for a moment.

  “Maybe you never realized—you were what, seven or eight?—but leaving home almost destroyed your father. That’s what got him drinking.”

  “Yeah, then why did he go? Why didn’t he come back?”

  Sharon sighed. “He’ll have to tell you that himself.”

  “He hasn’t told me bugger-all, Sharon. Nobody has. And you know what? I’m sick of it, sick of mysteries. Nobody wants to tell me anything. Are you the reason he left?”

  “No, Wick. I met your fath
er five years ago. It wasn’t about another woman, I can tell you that much.”

  “And what the hell was today supposed to prove? Well, it didn’t prove anything, you know that? So he’s a great artist. So what?” I slammed the dash with the flat of my hand, making Sharon jump. “Today just made things worse!”

  Suddenly it was dead quiet inside the Honda. Sharon stared ahead at the woodpile, gripping the steering wheel, her knuckles white with the strain.

  She tipped her head a little. “See that van?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Almost everything your father owns is in there.”

  “So?” I said again, right away feeling bad that I’d snapped at her. None of this was her fault, I knew. She was caught in the middle.

  Sharon looked right into my eyes. “His keys are on the dresser in my bedroom. If he finds out I helped you,” she added, “he’ll leave me. I know he will.”

  I got out of the Honda. I bent over, leaning on the roof, and looked at her. Her hands still clutched the wheel as if she were hanging on for her life.

  “You love him, don’t you?” I said.

  She sobbed and reached for the key. The engine roared to life. I stepped back and shut the door. I watched her back out of the driveway and pull away down the street. Why would someone like her love him I wondered. I went into the house.

  TWENTY

  I KNEW WHAT SHARON HAD INVITED me to do and I knew I was going to do it. In her bedroom sunlight washed over the cheap furniture and the faded blue counterpane on the bed. One of the old man’s shirts hung from the doorknob. I found his keys on the dresser, just as Sharon had said.

  I opened the van’s rear door first because that’s where he kept all his stuff. As I searched I lifted the canvas bags and cartons down and placed them carefully on the gravel so I could put each one back in exactly the same place. I didn’t really give a damn if he found out I was snooping around, but I had to think about Sharon.

  The first carton was small. It contained a couple of decks of cards, a cribbage board and four old shoeboxes. One shoebox was full of tapes, lined up neatly, so that the backs of the cases were upright. In the centre of each, partially covering the label, was a red dot, the kind you can buy in office supply stores. All the tapes were Mozart. That figures, I thought, he’s a classical music nut. What didn’t figure was the neatness.

  I put the lid back on and examined another shoebox. Same thing, but this time the dots were blue, and the tapes were Puccini operas. The third box was yellow dots on country-and-western classics tapes. The last shoebox contained ten or eleven CDS, with all the colours represented, along with green dots for operas.

  I replaced the shoeboxes in the carton and set it aside. The next was full of cold-weather clothing. I groped around among the sweaters, mitts and stuff, finding nothing of interest.

  The third carton was heavy. It contained blocks of cedar and pine. For his carving, I figured. I set that box down in the driveway with the others. Next came a metal tool box with a hinged lid that opened to reveal wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, a tube of body-filler and a couple of whetstones. So far I hadn’t found anything earth-shaking.

  The last cardboard carton was the smallest. I lifted it down to the ground and knelt beside it, then pried open the interlocked flaps. There was what looked like a ratty old shirt rolled into a ball, but when I took hold of it I realized something was wrapped up in it. I unrolled it carefully to reveal a china bowl, a small silver cup and a silver spoon. The bowl tugged at my memory. Around the edge were rabbits, the kind you see in kids’ books, running on their back legs, holding each other’s paws so they formed a chain of running bunnies around the rim of the bowl. The bunnies were from those Beatrix Potter books the old man would buy me but never read to me. “Ask your mother,” he’d say. But she never had the time. I examined the bowl more carefully.

  It was my bowl. It was the one I had used as a baby.

  The cup had my name engraved in graceful flowing letters: Steven Chandler, along with my birthdate. The spoon was one of those baby spoons with the handle looped back on itself. It had my name on it too.

  I stared at the objects, seeing quick Replays of myself in a high chair. My hands shook as I carefully rolled up the bowl, cup and spoon in the shirt.

  I removed a big scrapbook from the box and set it aside. At the bottom of the box were three rubber stamps, and an old stamp pad. I knew that one stamp would say DAD, another would show the address of the bungalow I grew up in, the newer one, the address of the condo. But I looked at them anyway, at the raised rubber numbers and letters.

  Taking a deep breath, I picked up the scrapbook. The first few pages held pictures of me as a baby and as a little kid. The photos were glued to the black background. One or two showed me and the old man. There were no labels, no dates and no pictures of my mother. The next page held a copy of the program from my graduation from 20th Street School. Then came a few pages of photos from the local newspaper showing me at various wrestling meets. In one of them Hawk and I stood with our arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning like fools.

  As I had expected by that point, I found the photo that the old man used to do the carving of me, identical to the one that I had framed and hanging on my wall. This one was ragged, as if it had been handled a lot. I looked closer. There were faint pencil lines drawn with a straight-edge and protractor to note the angles of the two figures.

  I didn’t need to see any more. I put all these things carefully into the carton and replaced all the cartons and bags in the back of the van exactly as I had found them. I locked up the van and went to the chopping block in the yard. I started whaling away with the axe, harder than Sharon had showed me, harder than I had to.

  “You bastard,” I said as I slammed the axe into the wood. “You stupid bastard.”

  This time I was talking about myself.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SHARON AND THE OLD MAN came back about supper time. I was at the kitchen table having a cup of tea, nursing the blisters on my hands, and there was an awesome pile of stove wood out in the yard. The old man had had a few. He came in, took a look at me, went to the fridge to get a beer, then left the kitchen. I heard the bedroom door slam.

  Sharon asked me if I was hungry. When I shook my head she went to the bedroom too. The door slammed again. I heard them talking—not arguing, but talking seriously. It went on for a while, then I heard Sharon’s voice, louder than before.

  “Why don’t you just tell him? He’ll understand.”

  “No!” the old man shouted.

  Right after that he came out of the room and into the kitchen, patting his pockets. “You seen my keys?” he asked.

  A hot sinking feeling rushed into my gut as I suddenly felt the bunch of keys pressing against my leg in the pocket of my jeans. I looked up at the old man as he searched the kitchen counter. Frantically I tried to think of something.

  “Uh, why don’t you sit down for a minute.”

  “Huh? Why?” The old man looked at me like I had a flower growing out of my forehead.

  “I’d, um, I’d like to talk to you about the show. Here, let me get you another … um, a beer.”

  I went to the fridge, hoping there’d be another beer left. I should have known. There were more than half a dozen. I twisted the top off one.

  “Sit down,” I said, “and relax.”

  The old man was still looking at me strangely. No wonder, I thought guiltily. This is the first time I’ve talked normally to him since he picked me up in Toronto. He sat down and took a pull on the beer.

  I heard the bedroom door open but Sharon didn’t appear.

  “Anyway, like I said, I really liked the show. It was—”

  “So how come you took off?”

  Good question, I thought. “I don’t know. When I saw the sculpture by the door I was sort of shocked, I guess.”

  The old man considered this. He set the bottle down on the table. “Well, guess I can’t blame you.”
r />   At that point Sharon came in and said brightly, “Anybody want coffee?” which was a pretty lame question, since I had half a cup of tea left and the old man had most of his beer. She started fussing around with the coffee makings anyway.

  The old man suddenly found his beer bottle interesting. He stared at it and started to run his thumbnail through the label, top to bottom.

  “Where did you get the picture of me wrestling?” I asked. “The one you used for the sculpture.”

  Sharon shot me a worried look. I realized too late what I had given away.

  “I mean,” I added hastily, “I assume you worked from a photo. The sculpture was so life-like.”

  But the old man didn’t seem to notice. “Sharon saved it for me. She has a friend in TO. who looks out for stuff about you in the paper.”

  He continued to pick fiercely at the label on the bottle. He looked up at Sharon, then back to the label. “I did it for you,” he said. “I wanted to make up for … all those years, even though I knew I couldn’t.”

  I felt my throat thicken. I glanced at Sharon, who had given up the show of making coffee. She stood leaning against the sink, arms crossed. She nodded to me.

  I looked back at the old man, feeling my face suddenly hot. “Will you tell me one thing?” I blurted. “Why did you leave? How could you do that to me?”

  “I had to,” he said.

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “She made me.” He said it so softly I could hardly hear. But I remembered our argument a few days before at Chutes Park. He’d said I didn’t have to come. I had told him Mom made me and he had said I was too old to be told what to do.

  All the hurt and anger began to rush in again, the way the wind rushes into your house when you open the door on a stormy night, and I started to get mad.