“Andy. Andy, the dog.”
Andy had long since run around the building and out of sight. Quickening into a ridiculously fast walk, Pat could see the blatant geometric impossibility of her reaching the gate before the dog did.
“Here, girl. Here, girl,” she called, half running.
The bright blue leash dangled behind the galloping dog, and as it passed through the open gate, Pat hoped its handle would catch on something. There’d be a yelp, but they’d get her. No such luck. Passing and shutting the gate herself, Pat rounded the corner of the building to see Andy running into a field on the opposite side of the road, and the puppy, leash snaking out behind, following.
She saw so much. The driver’s lips moved as he talked, head bent just slightly to his passenger. The speeding tires locked suddenly on the dark pavement. Her boy turned back at the sound of the brakes. Caught, finally, the blue leash snared under one tire, grew taut, and whipped the dog under another.
“Don’t look,” she thought to yell, already running, already undoing her coat. “Don’t look,” at the unbelievably fluffy chest split and pumping fast blood, at the small, sharp teeth broken into red and yellow pools. Pat made it to the body before the driver could even open his door.
Unwilling to ask her to move, looking now at the top of her head, he temporarily forgot about his window crank and yelled over talk radio into the solid window. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see — Where’d he come from?” Only the passenger saw the boy approach then freeze at the sight of this tall woman gathering up the dog in her own coat. Her bloody hands were long and slender even as they strained around the weight gathered in her darkening coat.
A few years later, arguing with his mother on the phone again, Andrew recalled those hefting arms and her cheque-book euthanasia. “You helped the dog,” he snapped at her over the phone.
“Who did I help?” she asked him back, asking but not quite saying, I was helping you.
28
Another bright pill lolls on the highway’s black tongue. As soon as he notices the roadside daub of canary yellow, his pace quickens slightly. His thighs, hounds trembling on a scent, suspect that the bright yellow in the distance is another cyclist. He cranks out another few kilometres, thighs straining at the leash, without knowing whether the jolt of yellow is indeed another rider or, if so, whether the rider’s coming or going. Will he meet or chase the other rider? Meat or cheese?
Finally, he sees a gap between the yellow dot and a distant white house close. Speed and colour all but certify that the shape is another rider, not a runner, in this brightest of sports. More even than those for running, cycling jerseys, jackets and helmets leap out in the highest voltage yellows, high-frequency magentas and radioactive blues. Cycling socks usually collar the ankle in bands of colour, if not some flag or image, reggae or tartan, cartoon or psychedelic, while the jogger pounds on in mute white. In part, these jolts of colour are designed to awaken the sleepy eyes of drivers, to be anything other than asphalt grey, minivan blue or evergreen.
Cyclists have an honour roll of the fallen, riders killed by drivers, firm legs crumpled by tired eyes. Thousands of kilometres ahead of him on the Trans-Can, near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Dugald Christie, a BC lawyer, was struck down on his third cross-Canada ride to campaign for better legal aid. Australians lose their Olympians to drivers; Amy Gillett and Darren Smith were wiped out on training runs. Mark told Andrew that urban bicycle couriers annually ride a silent midnight vigil for their fallen.
Henry Ford is credited with inventing the assembly line. He didn’t. He adapted the assembly line from the disassembly line of the slaughterhouse. Carcasses, then cars, strung on a line.
But more than just safety brightens cycling clothing. Every squirt of primary colour is also an homage to cycling’s industrial origins.
The near nudity of runners is surpassed only by swimmers. For cyclists, colour squirts into their clothing to thank test tube and lab, to flag this enduring fusion of a natural skeleton to an engineered one. The only earth tone on a cyclist is mud.
Lab, indeed. Snorting above his curved handlebars and breathable gloves, he switches his cycling computer over to its stopwatch. If he had a sextant or some kind of calibrated looking glass, he could clock the seconds the other rider takes to travel between two points and then calculate his speed. Or hers.
Shrewd fatigue finally tables a debate, solemnly lists the casualties of his pointlessly chasing Yellow. What does this three-kilometres-an-hour leap in pace and pulse yield? What does it cost? Why are you faster for someone else? And your pace — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Fatigue’s a saboteur poisoning the ear, an isolationist. Yellow and I could chat route and chafe, swap tales of flats and broken chains. Have you ever been without patches and used a fiver to keep yourself going? Money in lieu of a patch? Why not a piece of your map? Money is stronger. Or we could build a communal meal. My chili and your . . . please don’t have chili. Maybe he (she) has vegetables. A starburst red pepper. A buttery avocado. Does he (she) know that “pannier” originally meant “bread basket”? Companion. Company. We’ll break the bread we carry. (Keep your Nutella buried.)
These bright marbles roll in a green bowl. Peak to uneven peak, this valley stretches for nearly ten kilometres. On flat land, free of the panniers, one pedal stroke, one plunging shank, would roll Andrew’s frame roughly two metres. Here on the New Brunswick highway’s curling ribbon, fully laden, spilling down one hill, falling back the next, he’ll sink left then right more than five thousand times to end this valley.
Who doesn’t want to be faster? Riding trails in Kingston or Halifax, he had been certain that some guys rode just to hunt out a race, ears cocked for a distant rustle in the leaves or the zip of fat tires along dirt. Every three or four weeks some single rider or, even more ominous, a silent pair, would find him unawares, sliding noiselessly into the bottom of a narrow switchback climb or shooting a pocket of coaster. These grandsons of men who were paid to sweat now paid to do it.
Their unannounced races started with nothing more than a shaking of the trees. Asses inched back on seats. The balls of the feet were re-discovered. Knees swung out to cut finer corners, and yet no race was officially announced. If someone pulled onto the main artery beneath the power lines, when he turned into your already burning climb, you could no more declare, “To the willow tree” than you could ask for a handicap. And yet everyone knew exactly what each turn or run meant. Fingerless gauntlets were everywhere thrown. When he had described these unannounced but unmistakable forest races to Betty, she asked, “Are you riding bikes or rulers? Me, Big Dick. Ride money bike fast.”
Yes, Betty, yes, yes, yes. And yet here he is gunning for the yellow jersey in the distance, all considerations save for the pass wiped away. The thrill of pushing past and the fear of being swallowed are hardwired, undiscussed but unforgettable.
The yellow rider hits the bottom of the climb out of this valley. The road is a tailor’s tape measuring rise and fall. Still on the flat, Andrew has a specious gain on Yellow, crunching the space between them but not the time. The bottom of the hill will bounce him back, flip time Yellow’s way. Ascent is mapped with the burn in heart and lungs. A climb actually taxes slightly different muscles in the legs. Ground is won or lost on the butcher’s wire of a hill, two strung hearts scraped on the inclined blade. Five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain, Spain’s Big Mig, lived his climbing years with a standing heart rate of twenty-eight beats per minute. Back at UNS, nearly forsaking his bike for a library carrel, Andrew had felt his heart rate climbing back up to the average sixty-eight.
Now he’s close enough to the other rider to see a glistening calf (androgynously shaved, impressively chiselled). In the pass of an actual race, attacking as it is accurately called, the attacker would surely fuel off the smell of his opponent, must push for that mossy aluminum whiff just when it’s most needed. Entering the climb, Andrew realizes that this could also flip, that this
very air would also be traded. The passing fuel you take from me will soon give me yours.
29
“Prison saved us from batch,” Andrew told Betty one night over dinner. “When you’re young, you can live with a phrase, especially a phrase of your parents, for years without catching all its angles. Batch lots, Dad used to say of the two of us. It was years before I got bachelor. After Mom left, when I stayed with Dad, he’d say we were batching it. He’d already been teaching in prison for a few years.”
“Bachelors by day, bachelors by night,” Betty concluded. “What was it, wieners ’n’ beans on Monday nights? Fish sticks on Tuesdays?”
“Pretty much. But more than just our diet changed. Something about prison, all that control, all those rules — he got more managerial, sure, but that could have been just the disease. It was a long climb down, but not a steady one. Ability would plateau for years and then drop. He still drove until I was seventeen.”
“He drove until he could stop.”
“No, really, he was okay. Just errands in town. Got himself to work and back. But prison, it made him more scheming.”
“Don’t tell me he tried to join a heist crew.”
“More like a painting crew. One night, eating dinner right here, he just looked up and said, ‘Yellow.’ He suddenly wanted the dining room painted yellow. We didn’t always admit what he couldn’t do any more. Repainting? That meant admitting you now had to pay someone to repaint the walls your old hands, your hands and your wife’s hands, had painted a few years ago. Let it grey another year. Get a bigger TV and let the scuffs hang.”
“Maybe he just read some advice in a magazine. My mom probably wrote articles about divorced dads and redecorating.”
“It was more like training than decorating. He hired a painter to paint and to teach me to paint. Older guy, more expensive, but he had the moves and was willing to share them. Set the brush, then move it. Look and your hand will follow. You find wet roller seams with your ear, not your eye. I’d grown up doing this, listening to instructions, guiding my hands with Dad’s instructions. If he was no longer able to advise me, he hired somebody who could. He always said, ‘You can buy anything, if you pay enough.’”
“That sounds like a dad, all right,” said Betty.
“When everything was limited — the shirts he could wear, the chairs he could use — his brain changed. Evolved is probably the word. The arms lost reach so the imagination gained.”
Stan thinned everywhere save for a little paunch, his “goody bag.” His shoulder blades sliced through his sallow back. His collarbone was a bow. Most relevantly, his sense of touch diminished with every millimetric curl of his fingers, every hidden fraying of nerve endings.
His tracheotomy tube, that arc of silver respiration, was replaced twice a week. Working slowly, usually after a shower, air-drying in his saggy boxer shorts, Stan would boil a small aluminum pot of water on the stove to sterilize the alternate tube, its two inserts for night and day and the glass jar that would house them. The bent fingers of his tented right hand could fit into the wide grips of a pair of rubber-handled tongs while the idle left was indeed quick work for the red devil of the glowing stove burner.
Younger, Andy simply assumed there was no other cause than Disease No.1 for the blunt, nail-less fingers of his father’s left hand. Surely the fingers were also curled by the foul gravity that was changing the orbit of his ribs. In the kitchen at four years old, when he saw Stan’s left hand support his right and a saucepan handle in it, when the dangling left fingers brushed the angry red spiral of a maximized stove burner, when the burned fingers came up weeping, Andy thought adults, not his dad, felt less pain.
“Dad, your fingers.”
“Oh, damn.”
Two, maybe three years would pass before some casual question of Andy’s about the blunted, penile fingers of Stan’s left hand prompted Stan to clarify their history of partial amputation. “No, no. I lost them to infection,” he said. “If the fingertip gets really infected, the nail becomes like a roof. Off they went.” Stan drew the clean, bent fingertips of his right hand over the butt ends of the left.
Betty didn’t wait, couldn’t wait, more than a week between hearing about Stan’s hand and asking to feel Andrew’s imitation of it. Love lets you out of one cage and puts you in another. Andrew rubbed the knuckles of his fist across her hips. Not his fingertips, not a tongue, not even his smooth palm. Knuckles and then knuckle pinches. His whole fist sank between her thighs to give her a slightly gentler version of what wrestlers call a crotch tilt. Her message had been unmistakable. Show me. Show me. No one had ever cared so much about what he cared about. But then, after a meeting with his father’s lawyer and a dinner with his mother, he could no longer hold on to the two things he cared about most.
Coaxing him to sleep one night, she’d given him her yoga advice. “Your body is the past, your mind is the future. Your breath unites them in the present.” That winter he stopped breathing easily.
30
Fewer than two hundred metres of hill separate Andrew and the nameless rider in front of him. Although this distance will quickly double, then double again, seconds after the yellow-jerseyed rider crests the hill, Andrew feels the math is in. Unless Yellow is playing the touring cyclist’s version of cat and mouse, unless his (her) pace in this valley was an alluring feint to draw him in, Andrew will claim the next valley. What a charming prelude to a shared dinner. Say there, Crushed One, do you have plans this evening? Oy, Vanquished, got any cheese?
Once, twice, he glimpses the silver in Yellow’s mirror but nothing more. No concerned eyes. No revealing whiskers.
Up until this final inclined stretch of the race, he has told himself he only wanted the challenge and then, honestly, the company. An evening of chat. Stories of the road. But the climb doesn’t believe that. You want to win. Win what?
In Kingston, when he had learned to ride trails with Mark, there had been plenty of post-ride chats, but Mark was the exception to many rules. Meeting other riders on Kingston’s Fort Henry trails or the Long Lake run in Halifax, Andrew found that the chiselled calves and thighs were usually accompanied by a wiring shut of the jaw. Most riders don’t speak; they just spit and change gears, maybe leaning over to pointedly examine the transmission on your bike. Groupo? Skins? If anything, they ask, “How many k?” In ways, Betty was right: they ride rulers not bikes.
Late sunlight pours down on both climbers like boiling oil. To meet in the next hour might mean sharing camp with a stranger. He’ll miss his chance to walk around half-naked airing his swampy nethers.
Nothing unites them more than Yellow’s refusal to brake or waver. Andrew will almost certainly take the next valley, but for now they’re fighting tooth and metal claw. However much his thighs burn with fatigue and lactic acid, envy makes them burn hotter as he watches Yellow scale and crest the peak of the hill. Yellow raises his back to stretch it out, while Andrew remains cramped in a climbing crouch. Yellow rolls his head left then right before pouring himself into the drop. All the while Andrew is hip-deep in pain. What pure, murderous envy.
When Andrew crests the same hill, his envy turns into fuel. Yellow currently has the descent, but Andrew has the legs. He draws some water, stretches his neck and prepares to scream downhill into a pass. Yet he doesn’t crank the pedals. He stops pedalling but doesn’t brake. The distant yellow dot moves. Inertia seeps from Andrew’s tires. His dwindling stop is comically slow. Finally, his right toe clips out and comes down. He dismounts and stretches to guarantee Yellow a lead. Christ for a beer.
Gulping tepid water in fading sunlight, he finally sees valley, not road, province, not climb, and he lets Yellow go, gladly. This will be his turn from the brothel gates, his bride at the altar, the predictable career he abandoned. Pursuing and passing the other rider would have reduced days of this trip to a simple chase: attack then defend. Introspection and wisdom would have been tossed aside as dead weight. And, having let Yellow go, he can retu
rn to wondering if it was a man or a woman. Paused here on his hilltop, watching Yellow fade into the sunset, he can concentrate on his erection without fixating on man or woman. He can think person or body. He definitely thinks legs.
31
Andy and Stan also had their races. Races with each other and against each other. Races against time. Once, they raced together slowly on a crowded bus from Kingston to Toronto. They would race again when they got off in Toronto, travelling from bus station to doctor’s office. All of those races in bone.
Andy was thirteen years old, and soon — four to six months — he’d be taller than his dad.
“You just wait, Stanner; I’ll give you progress reports on your bald spot.”
“Evil, evil boy.”
“Or spots, I should say.”
“You remember what a will is, don’t you?”
Whenever Andy saw Pat — Christmas, the once or twice they got away in March — his height was always the first thing she mentioned. “It’s what I do,” he occasionally said or, “It’s my job.” He never told her that Stan was shrinking.
Despite fading muscle and warping bone, Stan had still been driving in Kingston. His job at Allenville Correctional. Grocery stores selected not for value or quality but for their immunity from left-hand turns, their proximity to slow side roads. Always the dry cleaners. For years Andy thought that’s just how men’s pants got cleaned, making no connection to Stan’s races to the washroom. Stan could drive around for small errands in Kingston. But a drive into Toronto? Impossible.
Once a year they devoted a whole day to thirty minutes with Dr. Khan, one of the specialists. Even today Andy couldn’t say whether Khan was Neuro or Rehab, OT or PT. Back then he didn’t know what those acronyms stood for, didn’t even know the name of Stan’s disease or if it had one. If his were a condition Andy had ever seen in a doctor’s office, on television, in a movie, maybe Stan would have used a name around the house. In life before a web search, syringomyelia was a private noun, a unique coin. If it were something exclusively internal, a hidden worker’s strike in the pancreas, a length of intestine blown like rails in war, a name might help carry Andy in. But here, arms bent ruinously, one leg curling out, the other frozen, what was in a name? By the time he met Betty, he had said the word aloud less than five times.
The Push & the Pull Page 8