No Signature

by William Bell

  As soon as we were back in the dorm I forced myself to pick up the phone. Taking a deep breath I punched in Hawk’s number. I figured I’d just play it cool, tell him about the matches, act as if everything was normal.

  “Hello?” It was Hawk’s mother.

  “Hi, Mrs. Richardson, it’s Wick.”

  “Oh, hello, Wick. How are you?” Her voice was lifeless and sad.

  “Um, fine. I’m in Thunder Bay at the meet. Is Hawk there?”

  “He … isn’t here now, Wick.”

  “Oh. When will he be back?”

  There was a long pause. “Malcolm is … Malcolm is in the hospital, Wick.”

  “Why?” I asked, suddenly afraid, “What’s the matter?”

  “He was almost killed last night. He crashed the car.”

  Through the telephone line the crying started.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “You LOOK LIKE YOU’VE SEEN A GHOST.” My father stood in the middle of the room, his beer in his hand, an anxious look on his face.

  “It’s Hawk,” I said, putting the phone down and lowering myself slowly into a chair. My hands shook and my throat had suddenly gone dry.

  “It’s what? I don’t get you.”

  I tried to assemble the bits of information that Hawk’s mother had given me, bits that ricocheted around inside my skull, resisting any sort of order. “My friend Hawk smashed up the car. He’s in the hospital. She said he almost died, that he’s on the critical list.”

  My father sat in the chair opposite me. “What happened?”

  “She … she said he hit a bridge on the Gardiner Expressway. She said he was drunk.”

  I knew the exact place. Hawk had been going west on the Gardiner and had taken the exit ramp to the Lakeshore. That ramp goes off to the right, then curves in a giant S under the bridge before it joins the Lakeshore. Hawk had missed the first curve of the S and slammed into the massive concrete bridge abutment, head-on, with enough speed to demolish the Richardsons’ little Toyota.

  “He did it on purpose,” I said.

  “She said that?”

  “No, she probably didn’t realize. But I know it. He tried to kill himself.”

  My father took a pull on his beer, hesitated, then passed it to me. “Take a drink, Steve, it’ll help to calm you down.”

  I did as he said, forcing the cool suds down my throat. The drink seemed to help me get my breath. I handed it back to him.

  “Keep it,” he said. “I’ll get another one.” He went to the little fridge. As he popped the new can open he asked, “What … how do you know he did it on purpose?”

  “Because Hawk never drinks. One summer after we finished grade nine he and I got drunk. We just wanted to try the stuff. The next day he was so sick he vowed he’d never drink again. And he never did.”

  “Maybe he fell off the wagon, like they say.”

  “No, not him. Besides, he’s an absolute fanatic about seatbelts. He never drives without it on, never rides in someone else’s car without his seatbelt on. He won’t let you drive with him unless you wear yours.”

  My father was silent awhile. Then he said, “Why would he try to kill himself?”

  I told my father about what I had discovered in the locker room. How I had abandoned Hawk when he needed me. How I should have known from the phone call I had made from Sharon’s house that he was being harassed by other kids. How I should have done something then.

  “I was only worried about myself,” I said bitterly, “and what people would think about me. I never considered him.”

  “Steve,” my father said gently, “it’s not your fault.”

  “I let him down, Dad. I should have been there for him.”

  “Yeah, you did let him down. But you didn’t pour the liquor down his throat. You didn’t put him in the car.”

  I shook my head.

  “Look, Steve, I know what I’m talkin’ about. It’s like me and the booze. Quite a few years ago, I had it real bad. I seemed to be drunk all the time. I had all the excuses in the world to drink. It was always somebody else’s fault. Then after I met Sharon she helped me see that no matter how hurt I was, it was me makin’ the decision to try to run away into a bottle. It was me, no one else. This friend of yours, he’s suffered a helluva lot. We’ll never know, probably, how much pain he’s been through. But he’s the one who chose how to handle the pain.”

  “Dad, I let him down,” I said again.

  “Okay, fine. You did. But most people in your situation would have acted the same way. Don’t you think so?”

  I thought about the other guys I know. How we had all grown up the same way, killing off parts of ourselves so we’d be hard and tough, so nobody could ever accuse us of the ultimate sin.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “So don’t think about what you didn’t do then. Think about how you can help him now.”

  “Dad, I want to go back to Toronto to see him. Will you take me?”

  “What about the tournament? You could win the gold.”

  “I don’t care about that now.”

  My father smiled. He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I figured you’d say that.”

  THIRTY

  WE PULLED INTO SAULT STE. MARIE at about 3:00 a.m., picked up Sharon, and hit the road again. Exhausted by the tournament and the long drive from Thunder Bay, I sacked out in the back seat.

  I woke up to the sounds of traffic on the highway. It was boiling hot inside the van and my mouth felt thick and sticky. The sun was high in the sky.

  Sharon swung west onto the 401, changing lanes jerkily as we merged with the traffic. We took the 427 south and then, a few miles farther on, the exit ramp to the Queensway. I soon saw the blue signs with the white H on them that indicated a hospital ahead. We stopped at a light and I could see the Queensway General, across the road from Sherway Shopping Centre. Sharon turned into the parking lot and took a ticket from the machine.

  “Want me to come in with you?” my father said.

  I felt a pain in the pit of my stomach. Now that we were there, I didn’t want to go in.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Why don’t we go across to the mall there and get a bite to eat?” Sharon suggested to my father.

  “Uh, yeah, good idea. I’m starved.”

  We got out of the van. “We’ll meet you here later, Steve,” my father said, squinting against the bright sun.

  “Okay.”

  Before they left, Sharon put her arms around me and squeezed hard. “Everything will be okay, Wick,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, certain she was wrong.

  Inside, the hospital was cool and dark. At the information counter I asked the woman where Hawk’s room was, then followed her directions along gloomy corridors that smelled of unnamed chemicals. An old man dressed in a ratty brown bathrobe shuffled by me in slippered feet, pushing a wheeled IV stand along in front of him. I passed a nursing station. One nurse was on the phone, another was writing on a clip-board, while a candy-striper poured orange juice into paper cups lined up on a tray. I turned another corner, passed a room in which someone was yelling “Ah! Ah!” in a long painful wail that set my nerves further on edge.

  At the end of the corridor, just past another nursing station, I saw a closed door. It was Hawk’s room. I took a deep breath and put my hand on the door to push it open.

  “Can I help you?” came a voice behind me.

  The nurse was tall, her coal-black skin contrasting with the crisp white of her uniform. She held a chrome tray in one hand. On it, a hypodermic needle lay on a small towel beside a tiny bottle.

  “I’m here to see Hawk.”

  “Who?”

  “Uh, Malcolm Richardson.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “I’m …” I’m his best friend, I was going to say, but the words stuck in my throat. “Yeah, a cousin.”

  “Well you can’t go in now. I’m just about to give him a shot. You can wait over the
re.”

  She pointed to a couple of chairs set before a window. I went over and looked out onto the lawns and garden at the back of the hospital.

  The door opened a moment later and Hawk’s mother came out. She paused as the door hissed shut behind her. She took a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes, then put the tissue back into the purse and snapped it shut. Her face was drawn and tight.

  She hadn’t seen me. I wanted to greet her, but I was afraid I’d blurt out that it was my fault her son tried to kill himself.

  She walked down the hall away from me. I let her go.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE NURSE CAME OUT of Hawk’s room about five minutes later and told me I could go in, but I couldn’t stay long.

  The semi-private room was warm and dark and silent. A floor-length curtain was drawn around the first bed and something inside hissed and gurgled. The figure in the second bed could have been anybody.

  Hawk’s right leg was encased in a heavy plaster cast and hung suspended from a rack attached to the side of the bed frame. His left arm, also in a cast from shoulder to fingers, rested across his chest. The inside of his right forearm was bruised and yellowed where an IV needle was taped to his skin. Hawk’s head was wrapped in bandages down to his eyebrows, and a few stitches puckered the scraped skin between his eyes and on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed and his chest rose and fell.

  I stood there, looking at him, wondering if he was asleep. “Hawk, it’s me,” I finally whispered, reluctant to break the stillness of the room. I cleared my throat and said, louder this time, “It’s Wick.”

  I thought I saw his eyelids twitch just a little, but I couldn’t be sure. I moved to his side. “Hey, Hawk, are you awake?” I whispered.

  His eyes remained closed. His chest rose and fell with the same peaceful rhythm. Maybe the dope the nurse gave him put him out, I thought, and some of the tension eased from my limbs.

  The silence was broken only by the gurgles and hisses from behind the curtain. I looked Hawk over. He sure had done it to himself. In spite of what my father had said to me, I still felt guilty, still felt responsible for the cuts and bruises and cracked bones. And yet his body, the body that wanted to do things with other men, repelled me. I couldn’t get my mind around that cold hard fact, and I knew I probably never would. There was no use trying to run away from that. But he was still my friend and I knew that the agony he felt inside was worse than the pain of his wounds.

  I forced myself to touch him. I knew I had to, or I would never touch him again. Carefully, so as not to hurt—or waken—him, I laid my hand on his shoulder, moved it slowly across the rough cloth of his hospital gown until one of my fingers touched his neck. His skin was warm, and his pulse beat against my fingertip. “I’m sorry, Hawk,” I whispered.

  Then I left the room. In the hall I asked the nurse how he was. She told me he was no longer critical, that eventually he would mend. Beyond that she couldn’t say.

  “He’s in a deep sleep,” I told her.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “He was awake when I left him.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  I MADE MY WAY THROUGH the hospital corridors. As I passed through the lobby the elevator doors opened and two men stepped out. One was grey-haired and he was crying. The other was younger, his son maybe, and he had his arm around the old man’s shoulder, comforting him.

  I was glad to get out into the sunlight again, even though it was hot. Sharon and my father weren’t back from lunch yet. The van sat baking in the heat. The red patches where my father had repaired the body work looked like wounds against the faded white paint.

  Out on the lawn there were three benches arranged in the shade of a big maple. I sat down at the one that faced away from the hospital and watched the traffic. Buses snorted along, belching diesel smoke. The passengers sat in the heat ignoring each other, staring into nowhere. Cars hurried along, the sun reflecting off tinted windows.

  I didn’t blame Hawk for pretending to be asleep. It had made it easier for both of us. If he hadn’t pretended, I wouldn’t have touched him.

  I wished I was five years old again so I could cry all the confusing emotions out of me. Instead, I sat there under the maple, wrestling with my feelings and losing on points. Girls were allowed to cry in front of people, I thought, but we weren’t. Girls were allowed to go Oooooh and Ahhhh when they saw something cute or sweet, or touch each other, hug each other, but we weren’t. We all did what Hawk had done. We pretended that a big part of us wasn’t there.

  I realized now—Hawk had known it all along—that the way a lot of guys talked about girls, as if they were meat, as if they were toys you used when you wanted to, was all a cover. They were afraid to treat girls like people because in girls they saw the part of themselves that they had been taught to kill.

  I had been no different. I remembered how embarrassed I had been at the opera when my father had cried. And I had pretended not to know him because he was a man and he had broken one of the big rules.

  Thinking of my father and Hawk like that, watching the cars carry their solitary occupants along the road, I wondered how many of those strangers out on the street held secrets inside them, and if any held secrets as terrible as Hawk’s and my father’s. Terrible because, if they came out into the sunlight, people would use them to tear you down. Illiterate, gay—both meant, people thought, that something was wrong with you.

  I used to think so, too.

  I got up off the bench and went back into the hospital.

  THIRTY-THREE

  HAWK’S NURSE WAS BUSY in the nursing station, with her back to the corridor, so I slipped into his room. The first bed was still curtained off, but the window drapes had been pulled aside, allowing the afternoon light to flood the room.

  Hawk’s head was propped up by three or four pillows. He was watching a little TV that swung out over the bed on a bracket. He had earphones plugged into his ears.

  His eyes widened in surprise when he saw me at the foot of the bed. With his good hand he slowly removed the earphones and pushed the TV aside. A ball game was on. Tiny players flickered across the screen, attempting a double-play.

  “Jays are losing again,” Hawk said in a voice that seemed slow and heavy. Probably the dope, I thought.

  “Oh,” I said. Then, “How’s the food?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t eat yet.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right.”

  There was a long pause. Both of us watched the commercial on the screen. A bunch of athletic-looking guys wearing tight jeans and checked shirts were standing on a dock trying to decide whether to go fishing or drink some more beer first.

  “Well, this conversation’s going real good, isn’t it?”

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  Another long pause.

  “I’m glad you know, Wick.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope it doesn’t make too much difference.”

  I couldn’t lie to him. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to being known as a gay’s best friend. So I settled for, “I’m here, Hawk. I’m not leaving again. Not unless you want me to.”

  Silence.

  “It’s gonna be hard, though,” he said. “Everybody knows now.”

  “How did you parents take it?”

  “They’ve known for a long time.”

  Hawk’s eyes switched to the TV again, so I looked too. Another ad. A well-dressed guy with thick hands and a firm jaw drove a sleek-looking red sports car up to a stoplight. Three women in tight dresses admired the car, then smiled seductively at the guy. The car was called Intimidator.

  Hawk spoke again, his voice thick with bitterness. “I should change my name from Hawk to Half-man.”

  “Hawk, listen—”

  “No, I’m serious. I’m so short I’m half a man. I’m gay, so I’m half woman.”

  “You never took any shit from anyone about your size, Hawk.”

  “Damn right.”

  “So …”

&n
bsp; “Yeah. This will be harder, though.”

  “Your parents are with you. So am I.”

  “It’s gonna be hard for you, too, Wick.” Hawk may not have been a scholar, but he wasn’t stupid either.

  “I know it is.”

  “I’ll understand if …”

  “Forget it, Hawk.”

  There was another long pause.

  “Want to watch the game for a while?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I pulled a chair up to the bed and leaned over, my arm resting on the bed beside Hawk. He took one earphone and I took the other. At the eighth inning the nurse came in with her trusty tray. She asked what I was doing there. Hawk wasn’t supposed to have any visitors.

  “Your cousin will have to leave,” she said to Hawk.

  Hawk looked at me and smirked. “See you later, Cuz,” he said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  MY FATHER AND SHARON dropped me off at home that afternoon, then went to find a motel. They had decided to stay in Toronto for a few days, to spend some of his earnings from his show in the Soo, they said, visit the art galleries, go to the symphony, see some new movies. But I knew he wanted to stick around because of me.

  Just as he turned down our street Sharon said, “Wick, your dad and I would like to invite you to spend the rest of the summer with us in the Soo. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Sharon, all that opera and cowboy music?” I joked.

  My father laughed and said around the stem of his pipe, “It’ll take at least the summer to get some musical taste banged into that shaved head of yours. Anyway, Steve, we’d really like to have you with us.”

  “Thanks, Dad, I’d like to, but I want to stick around with Hawk. For a few weeks, anyway.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed. Instead, he smiled. “I figured you’d say that. Here is where you probably should be. How about we agree that you’ll come up for at least two weeks toward the end of the summer.”