Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  And even though she married me, I never understood why. But that feeling was typical for your average male who doesn’t believe he is God’s gift to women. You never understand why you were chosen, even when you are told the reasons. You are happy that you were chosen and sometimes you can go for a very long period without questions, but every so often you find yourself staring at your wife, wondering, Why? Why me? What made me so special that she chose me over all the others? What did I have that the others didn’t? And then when she notices that you are looking at her, she can’t help but wonder what the hell you are doing.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  And the only thing you feel comfortable in answering her is, “Nothing.”

  Joan had a few more wrinkles and gray hairs than the last time I saw her, but nothing about her had really changed. She still commanded the attention of the coffee shop when she walked in and she still took my breath away, especially when our eyes met. A shiver of excitement ran through me when that happened, the same shiver I used to get as a teenager and some girl that I had a crush on happened to look my way.

  Unfortunately, the look of disappointment on Joan’s face also reminded me of those same teenaged crushes. No doubt those girls were disappointed that I was the one watching them, and Joan was probably disappointed that I had managed to turn up. I was also glad that the bruises on my face from my attack a couple weeks ago had faded. They would not have made a good impression. As it was, I was still sore and stiff in many spots but the headache was less intense and my vision was clear.

  But I didn’t dwell on that for long. Standing next to Joan was my son, Peter. If Joan’s presence took my breath away, Peter stopped my heart. It had been almost five years since I’d seen my boy, and though I mentally told myself he had aged, I expected to see a taller version of the kindergarten kid I left behind. I was completely caught off guard by the person standing next to my ex-wife. I first thought he was just someone who had walked in with her, some skater kid in a hoodie, looking to pick up a coffee on his way home from wherever skater kids went.

  But then I realized that this kid, this almost teenager, was my son. He had lost most of his baby fat and his face was much more angular, but at the same time, his body had filled in, giving him some heft and a presence similar to his mother’s. His hair was even more unruly than I remembered, and as he looked up at me, there was none of the preschooler inquisitiveness in his eyes, none of that wide-eyed stare that every four- and five-year-old gets when confronted with something new and interesting. There was curiosity, of course, a hopefulness, but it was mostly covered with a layer of vigilance. That look broke my heart and made it soar at the same time.

  When they arrived at my little table, I also realized how tall Peter had grown. When I last saw him, he was barely over three feet tall, the top of his head reaching my waist. Now, the top of his head was almost to my shoulder. I couldn’t help but blurt out, “Look at you. You’re so tall!,” and that sent a blush across his face and caused him to shrink back toward his mother.

  Joan did her best to break the awkwardness by offering a hand, but I made things worse by trying to pull her in closer for a hug or a kiss on the cheek. She held her place, loosening her grip to tell me that despite our past intimacies, we were now strangers connected only by our children and even that connection was tenuous. I had no qualms about admitting to myself that Joan probably looked at our relationship as the biggest mistake of her life. For me, it was the opposite.

  We ordered some drinks and pastry—I made a point of paying for everything—but the combination of my nostalgia for our relationship, her defensive and protective stance, and all the other baggage that we carried around about each other made our conversation stilted and banal.

  We talked about the weather, any old friends we happened to know, what kind of car she drove and if she liked it, and bits about our jobs. As for Peter, it was worse. He barely looked at me, and because I was so fearful of saying and doing something wrong, I questioned him like some out-of-touch relative, asking him stock questions about school, about his favorite subjects, what he liked to watch on TV. In return I got one- and two-word answers and nothing else. It would go down in history as the worst interview of my career, and then I realized that I was actually interviewing this kid, trying to get answers to a list of questions rather than trying to really get to know him.

  So for a second or two, I looked him over, saw how he sat, saw that the hoodie he was wearing was faded with age and a bit tight on his shoulders, which told me that it was, probably much to the chagrin of his mother, one of his favorite pieces of clothing. And by noticing the logo on the front, I found my way in.

  I asked him a question about the Oilers, the local pro hockey team. But instead of just asking whether he thought the team would do well this year or something as basic as that, I mentioned the name of a player the team recently signed and asked Peter if that player should be moved up from the third line to the second. He froze for a second, and for the first time during our meeting, he truly looked at me, wondering if he had heard the question correctly.

  “What did you say?” he asked, puzzled.

  “I asked if you think he should be moved up to the second line,” I said. “I mean, he’s been contributing much more than anyone else, but for some reason, they seem to keep holding him back, making him more of a checker when he’s really more a playmaker. I think if they move him up with some scorers, the Oilers really have a chance of creating more goals than they have lately, right?”

  Peter’s face lit up, and for the next couple of minutes we went back and forth on the Oilers, the merits of this and that player, the state of the team, whether the number of teams in the league was diluting the talent base, all the stuff that Canadian hockey buffs obsess about. Even though I knew the lingo and some of the details, I wasn’t as much of a hockey freak as my son, but then again, I wasn’t a ten-year-old boy growing up in Edmonton.

  Getting caught up in the comings and goings of the NHL was still as much a male rite of passage in Canada as drinking your first beer or touching your first bra strap. Joan cared nothing about hockey, and while her eyes glazed over with boredom, I could tell she was pleased that a connection was made between me and Peter.

  And while we talked, I came up with a plan to ensure that Peter and I would meet again. “Ever been to a game?” I asked, knowing the answer. Despite Peter’s being born in Edmonton and being a longtime fan of the Oilers, I was pretty sure that he had never been to a game. With even the cheapest nosebleed seats costing about fifty dollars apiece, it was not economical for families to go to a game. And with Joan not being a fan, she would consider such an expense frivolous.

  When Peter said, “No,” he gave his mother a quick and dirty look, and she tried to defend herself by explaining how much tickets cost.

  I interrupted her. “You wanna go to one?” I asked Peter.

  There was a moment of stunned silence, with Peter and Joan both staring at me as if I was crazy.

  “Seriously?” Peter asked.

  “No, this is not happening,” Joan said at the same time.

  I nodded to Peter. “No problem. You know where I work?” I said, and he nodded, the look on his face showing me that he made the connection. “I can make a couple of calls and it should be no problem.”

  “Like live at the Coliseum?” he said, shocked and surprised, now looking at me with frank admiration. “That would be fucking awesome.”

  “Peter!” Joan snapped in her teacher voice.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said with only a bit of humility in his voice. I did my best not to smile, remembering my own childhood when we were around friends, away from our parents, and we would swear like sailors. It was good to see that some things didn’t change between generations. “But could I go to a game?”

  Joan said no over and over again but she was fighting a losing battle. She knew her son inside and out, so even though she didn’t like hockey, she knew that g
oing to see a live Oilers game was probably one of the biggest dreams of his young life. And to deny him this would reverberate throughout the rest of their lives. At the same time I could see her seething anger just below the surface. This could have been the perfect excuse for her to cut Peter out of my life completely, but I knew that her love for our son, and her knowledge that this might become a turning point for our relationship, was more important.

  As for me, I knew I was being completely manipulative and would no doubt get an earful from Joan about it later. But I also knew that Peter’s first meeting with his dad after not seeing him for years would be more memorable than he’d thought possible. For a few short hours I would be his new hero and that was just perfect, even if there were deeper repercussions.

  Finally she acquiesced, and the way Peter smiled, the way his whole face lit up, the way he looked at me as if I was the greatest person in world, made my heart burst with the same delight that I had felt on the days he and his sister were born, when I first held him in my arms and realized that this was my child and that any and all of the preconceived notions I had had about children and child rearing were lost in a moment of pure joy. I just basked in the smile of my son and hoped that in time, I would get more and more smiles. And maybe he would talk to his older sister and one day she would smile at me in this way, too.

  25

  The next day, I was at the Native Friendship Centre. The doors were locked and since there were no windows in the concrete block of a building, I couldn’t tell if anybody was inside. I knocked and the sound of my pounding echoed inside the building. Still, nobody answered. I checked my watch. I was a little late, but to be honest, I was secretly pleased that the door was locked because even coming here was a big step for me.

  And now that the door was locked and nobody was answering, I had my excuse to step away. I was free to falsely congratulate myself for at least trying. To continue with the charade that I was really looking forward to this, I kicked the door in frustration. “Fuck it,” I said, and began to walk back to my neighborhood, a couple klicks away.

  As I walked away from the door a large pickup pulled into the lot. It spun in a half doughnut, spraying me with a bit of gravel. The passenger window rolled down and Francis waved at me. “Leo. Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  I walked up to the truck but didn’t get in; I leaned against the door, sticking my head halfway through the open window. “We aren’t going in?”

  He shrugged, only a tiny movement of the shoulder and a tilt of the head that could be saying a million things, anything from Sorry, to I don’t know; from Land? Man cannot own land, to The white man had more guns and apparently a tougher God so we just had to do what we had to do to adjust to the genocide. No white man I know has ever shrugged in that way. It reminded me of my mother and how she always responded when I asked if she knew if Dad was going to be home in time to drive me to hockey. “This was only our meeting place,” he said. “Get in.”

  “Where we going?”

  “You’ll find out,” he said, smiling. “Get in.” I hesitated for a second, a bad feeling sliding through and past, but then I realized I might have had some residual feelings from Jackie’s comment about avoiding yellow pickups. I shook it off and climbed in.

  “Excellent,” he said. “You’re going to like this.”

  We headed down 111th, to the west end of the city. Francis’s pickup was clean and in good shape on the inside, although the shocks bounced every time we hit a bump. That could have been the state of the truck or the state of the Edmonton roads. The cycles of bitter cold and dry summer heat Edmonton faced year after year wreaked havoc on the city streets. The city had several dedicated crews with the sole job of patching potholes and cracks in the streets, but they always had a tough time keeping up. And the heaving of roads as the frost rose from the ground every summer didn’t help. After a few minutes of nobody talking, Francis finally broke the silence.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the honest truth is that there are a number of people in the community who are, let’s say, a bit disappointed in the stories you’ve written so far. They haven’t really fallen in to the category of stories that they were expecting from the new Aboriginal issues reporter.”

  “Is this just you talking or is this really a concern from the community?” I asked a bit angrily. I hoped that this wasn’t his main reason for meeting with me. “Because you did say you enjoyed my writing about the young girl who was murdered.”

  “Yes, I did enjoy the writing, although not the topic of the story,” he said. “However, I am not one of those who are disappointed in your stories. I was just giving you the heads-up that there are people upset at these stories and that some have expressed an interest in contacting your superiors in order to let their views be known.”

  “I can deal with a few complaints,” I said, although I didn’t completely buy his explanation. There might have been some others concerned about my story but I bet he was one of them. “It’s all part of the job. But just for fun, what are they saying about my stories?”

  “I think the phrase is they aren’t ‘reflective of the true nature of the urban Aboriginal in Edmonton.’ Their words, not mine.”

  “They don’t like the fact that there might be a serial killer hunting native women in the city and that the police in and around the city were completely unaware of that possibility because many of these victims were native? They would rather that kind of news be kept quiet and that the deaths of these women continue to be dealt with with indifference? Is that what they want?”

  “Nobody wants that, and though many are appreciative of how you uncovered that news, there are also many others who were hoping for more positive stories from you. Stories that would focus on the more positive aspects of being an urban Aboriginal.”

  “Ah! A series of feel-good stories, showing positive role models like a successful native businessperson, politician, artist, musician, somebody like that?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And we’re supposed to pretend that all those other natives, the ones that live on the street, the ones in the foster-care system, or just those who have more difficulties than the average person, don’t exist.”

  “Of course not. We should do what we can to help those people, but there are those who were hoping that an Aboriginal issues reporter would not just cover the less typical Aboriginal issues such as homelessness, addiction, land claims, and so on.”

  “And the more positive stories would be better.”

  “To some, yes.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Leo, you have to understand that in many ways, the native community in Edmonton is no different than any other community in the city. So you can’t expect them to act any different. Human nature doesn’t make sense and one thing people have a tendency to forget is that natives are, at the core, still human,” he said with a laugh.

  “We don’t have a higher understanding of goodness, badness, spirituality, nature, or anything. We’re not all drunks living on the street, but then again, we’re not all shamans with an innate sense of the natural world. We’re pretty much like most everyone else in this country except for one difference.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It doesn’t matter what kind of native you are, whether you were raised in a reserve or not, whether you were exposed to the culture of your people or not, or whatever your life experience, every single Aboriginal person in Canada, in North America, suffers from a great wound. The wound of losing everything, of being forced out of the lives you lived and the homes and the land you lived in for thousands of years because the Europeans came across the Atlantic and took over the country.

  “It’s a cultural wound similar to the wound suffered by African Americans because of slavery and the wound suffered by Jews because of the Holocaust. I have it, you have it, the people who want you removed as the Aboriginal issues reporter have it. The differe
nce is in how natives deal with it.

  “For example, there are those natives, some of whom are those who want more stories about positive natives, who have a tendency to ignore the wound. They believe it’s not good for natives to rehash the past. The future of the Aboriginal peoples is in the future and we can’t remain in the past. This attitude is understandable because there are also many natives who revel in the wound, who believe that your status as an Aboriginal is equal to how much you have suffered because you are Aboriginal.

  “Someone like you, who probably never lived on or visited a reserve, isn’t truly native because even if your life was hard for whatever reasons, you haven’t endured the typical native suffering.

  “But both attitudes are flawed because if you ignore a wound, it just festers and will only kill you in the end if you leave it too long. And if you keep poking at the wound, never allowing it to heal, it will also kill you in the end. The trick, of course, is to find a balance between the two, to realize that there is a wound, to accept that the wound is bad, almost a mortal one, but to also realize that the wound can and should be healed so you can move forward. And when the wound is healed, you must never forget it.”

  “That’s it? As simple as that?” I asked. It was typical pop psychology, probably true in a sense, because no one could deny the suffering that Aboriginals around the world had been through. But it was also some of the same language that I had heard when I sat through those Gamblers Anonymous sessions so many years ago.

  I also knew that usually when people talk like this to someone they’ve just met they are doing one of two things: (1) trying to convert me to their way of thinking, or (2) using the lecture as a roundabout way of telling me something else. I figured the first choice because despite what he said earlier, I would bet that Francis wasn’t as completely happy with my story as he claimed. He was one of those who hoped for more positive stories about urban natives and no doubt he would have liked to have been the topic of one of those stories. I didn’t fault him for that; it was a normal reaction. Everyone believes their story is important enough for the newspaper or that they know of a story that is.