The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  Now their numbers are felt, not counted. These three are a net of young muscle tightening around him. Legs, legs, legs.

  Because one eye keeps checking the (filling) mirror and the (too-distant) trailhead, he can’t really tell how thoroughly or not the shitter in front has raised his arms. Only when Andrew brakes suddenly in the second before meeting the shitter do the young arms rise fully, and they are not shield enough for the quick lance coming. Braking both tires then briefly turning the handlebars away from the youth, Andrew opens a column of space his freed right leg can fill. Unforgettable will be the small, preparatory heel twist of his right foot, the minuscule dab of lateral force necessary to free his kick.

  Although he has never once forgotten the cleat waiting at the bottom of this whipping leg, Andrew is somewhat surprised to see its ferocious bite into the kid’s splaying cheek. More than force — no doubt pain, perhaps horror — drops the shitter to the ground and frees Andrew’s path.

  72

  Of course, twenty cents didn’t really end Pat’s first marriage.

  Shoe leather should be a labour index on any job. Her classroom and the Gamlin campaign had Pat running around for twelve to fourteen hours a day. When she walked into the campaign office at six-thirty that night, marooned in the mutinous, knee-high boots, a disastrous cycling lesson with Andy behind her, the heel was knocking. The refrain My mom pushed me in the ditch still hadn’t left her inner ear. By nine p.m., the heel clapped. When the last of the others filed out at ten-thirty, she wasn’t going to let the now flapping heel rob her old term-paper stamina. Gordon wouldn’t see that.

  He stood by a window reading a letter. Cars, the cars of their co-workers, could be heard starting and leaving from the parking lot beyond him. Extra light spilled briefly across the broad province of his shoulders. In the nearly empty office, the ka-clump of her heel and her compensatory shuffle became ridiculously loud.

  “Why don’t you just take them off?” he asked, turning.

  A committed problem-solver, Gordon Gamlin will — “Obviously I’ve thought of that. The zipper’s broken.”

  “Will you think I’m campaigning if I offer to take a look at it?”

  “I’ll know you are and have a camera ready.”

  He emptied his hands while walking toward her.

  She was ruined when he gave the desktop a demonstrative little double tap with all four of his fingers. “Hop up.” Her boots nearly reached her knees. Her skirt didn’t.

  “The tab’s not entirely broken,” he said while remaining bent over, sounding every inch the able diagnostician. “Hang on.” He stood back to fish change from his pocket. “Don’t ask how I used a pair of dimes in school. May I?”

  He raised an eyebrow, she a leg.

  In his hands, it was and was not her calf that filled the boot. His strong, collaring grip around her calf both added and released pressure. Immediately she felt the difference of his hand, of his body on hers, but there was also the distinct sensation that his hand gave more space to her body, expanding the very muscles it pressed. Gordon’s encircling grip finally confirmed what they had each known since the moment they met: together, they had a them body. One plus one equalled a sweaty three. Exhaling through her nostrils she could send part of her breath down into the grip of his hand. Her breath glowed inside his hand like the bones in an X-ray. His pinching dimes pulled the boot collar tight before opening the longest zipper of her life. At thirty-three, this zipper was the back of every dress she had worn for the past ten years of her marriage. The pants of her past, present and future were tugged open in his hands. The boot leather unclenched, but they did not. Because of the boot, she couldn’t feel his wedding ring at all.

  From sit-bone to heel, yes, she turned her knees out to curl her legs without actually spreading them. Her jaw rose to bare a little neck. Freed, the boot poured down her calf into his hands. Still cupping her heel in one hand, he looked at her just long enough before setting the other hand above and inside her knee to claim the leg entire. What agreeable gravity.

  Her only moment of anything less than joyous acquiescence, the moment when she pressed and angled not to complete a shape but to change it, came during his early chest-leaning push to get her on her back for the full prone offer. No, no, you’re going to look me in the face. Let me get that belt and fly, do more than just undress you, but you keep your face close to mine. This doesn’t happen without you knowing who I am.

  73

  Physically, the two other tent sackers could probably catch him as he bikes off from the body he just dropped with a kick. However quickly he bikes, plunging his legs so frantically that he rises in the frame and all but leaps off it, he is still biking uphill on a soft trail. For the first few metres, the runners should have more acceleration. But, wordlessly, they stop their pursuit at their fallen comrade. Physically, they could have him. Global war, contact sports, gang violence — intimidation is always the meta-weapon.

  He climbs chipped wood and adrenalin up the park trail. Swelling lungs, bursting heart, a still-empty mirror. Trail and panic flatten as he makes the bridge.

  Speed is downhill, and he chases it. Shooting out of the park, he follows the steep hill down toward the river. He slaloms between moving cars, cuts into oncoming traffic when necessary and blows through an intersection. After just three blocks he has biked past the area of the city he knows.

  If they call the police — if — they’d have to run for a phone first, then wait for a cop on the scene, a scene that includes piss on his tent walls and shit in one of his panniers. That won’t change his guilt at kicking the kid, but any doubt it can muster might slow or even curtail a pursuit by the police. Then again, what paper-pushing cop wouldn’t like a manhunt with the pedal down? He pours himself downhill toward the St. Lawrence and then turns left. The roads are flat alongside the river. He’ll see the police coming for miles, but they could also see him.

  His lungs, heart and legs hurt too much to feel guilty. He pushes them so they’re too busy to feel fear either.

  74

  Pat and Gordon kept having sex. The consolidating and demonstrative second time. The flatteringly committed third. Experimental with the fourth. They were together more than once, so the sex was more than curiosity, novelty, campaign fatigue, revenge, or indulgence.

  Pat evolved into a creature of guilt. She had selected the family shot to be used in Gordon’s pamphlet because of the way one entire half of his body (arm, shoulder, undoubtedly a fraction of hip) seemed to reach out for the body of his wife, Sandra. Let other candidates clutch at their children. Pat had wanted to emphasize that Gordon’s first successful election was by a woman.

  In her private, unvoiced defence she knew that guilt was now her element. Her father, a natural history buff with a worn library card, had given her a better explanation of evolution than any classroom teacher ever had. The big evolutionary moment didn’t occur when creatures simply crawled out of the sea to walk on land. Eating on land wasn’t even the end of the line. The big moment, a moment recorded best on Canadian soil yet unknown to most Canadians, occurred when marine creatures began to reproduce on land. Pat had already been breathing guilt for years before she met Gordon, guilt for her fears about Stan, her impatience, for how unconnected she felt. Even guilt about her fear. Careerism had been the slope she’d been climbing to raise her head above the sea of guilt. Now, the sex was just a conclusion. Evolution is a matter of survival, not choice.

  More than anything else, motherhood had taught her to distinguish surviving from thriving. The eighteen years of middle management that finds you pushed and pulled between your child and everything else: friends, school, your husband, the whole big world. Kids could be weeds or prize flowers, could grow by accident or design. Somehow they’d grab enough light and suck enough water to grow, but would they thrive? Family life, that expected, genuine stake here in the guilt, was also crucial in her amphibious evolution into a creature who could breathe guilt. Family is the cruc
ible of guilt. Just as it teaches you the weight of guilt, schools you in its challenging, enduring mass, so it also teaches independence. Always this background lesson of the family — fuck guilt.

  The neighbourhood guilt she could deal with easily enough. She’d move out. The whispers and raised eyebrows among fellow teachers in a staff room or at workshops wouldn’t be much of a problem if she quit. But there was Andy. Live with a lover, and you live with a full-time witness and part-time judge and jury. Even more intense are your children; they’ll judge you their entire lives.

  I can’t do it, Stan. Selfish. Weak. Scared. Shallow. Whatever you want to call me, yes, guilty as charged. Not in sickness, no.

  75

  As soon as his breakaway pace sags a little, he has to think. Spinning his legs madly, hitting and maintaining a pace he has never held before helps him avoid calculations of risk or probabilities of exposure. Leaving behind the last borders of Rivière-du-Loup, the cheap strip joints and public storage garages, he relies on routine rather than planning. Keep going west.

  He can only run so hard for so long, yet he had this same sobering thought yesterday morning with the slashed tire and now, after the kick, he’s trying to bike even faster.

  Inevitably, thought returns. To get away, what is he willing to do without? What would he have to do without in prison? Go to ground. You win this by hiding, not running. Hiding now is part of the long run. You must endure boredom before you endure pain. Cunning, not strength. Get off the fucking road.

  He’s finding survival to be a matter of will, not skill. Pushing one aching leg then the other, he hears the question Do you want to survive? grow into How different are you willing to become? Now more than ever, ego is the heaviest thing he carries.

  He slips into an empty cemetery and rolls toward the curtain of trees at its rear. The mercifully sylvan Maritimes. No city east of Quebec City lacks a visible treeline running its borders. The capital city of New Brunswick is positively besieged by trees, with forests abutting its shopping malls. Edmundston and Rivière-du-Loup are francophone coins briefly weighting endless blankets of green. Rolling toward the cemetery’s treeline, he is hit by a bizarre combination of laziness and boredom. No, I don’t want to drag this thing over a fence and into the woods. Four or five more hours to full dark. No food. No water. Christ, this burning crotch.

  Mostly he doesn’t want to be alone and still. For the epigraph of his application essay to UNS, he had chosen Pascal’s dictum that much of human suffering stems from man’s inability to sit contentedly alone in a quiet room. Hiding in a forest, this large, hot and temporary room of the woods finds him tracing the circumferences of the cigarette burns on his chest and knee. No tent. No sleeping bag. No water or food. Once again, his chase may be only hypothetical, but the blood underneath his shoe is certain. Be alone, wear tight, bright clothing and the whole world wants to fuck you up. To police, would his use of the shoe’s metal cleat constitute assault with a weapon, not just assault?

  When he had begun planning this trip, he had emailed Betty repeatedly with varying versions of two recurring answers to the obvious question of why. Why undertake such an arduous trip? Because it’s the right way for me to return home, to that home. And because life isn’t life without tests. I don’t know what exactly I’ll learn about myself, but I know I’ll learn something.

  Now, thirsty, angry and afraid, he finally grasps a lesson that has been building for years. Possibly on the run again, only possibly, he either has a new enemy or maybe even the need to have a new enemy.

  76

  The disease of one body in Andrew’s childhood home eventually changed every body in it and even the house itself. His childhood home turned sour. Betty’s parents each claim hers started out sour.

  Before their restaurant conversation with Pat dissolved the and of Betty and Andrew, these two children of divorce had talked about this powerful little conjunction and its evolution through the generations.

  “Jim and Elaine. Stan and Pat,” Betty announced. “What’s responsible for that sound? Don’t they sound different?”

  “Man first? Age of the names maybe? Mackenzie and Gabriel doesn’t sound so . . . so —”

  “Gluey. One divorce each, and yet I’m sure your brain does it as well as mine, plays this little and recording, just staples the names together.”

  “Trudy and Dave,” he sang.

  “In the eighties, two performance artists actually tied themselves together for a year. Like maybe six feet of rope.”

  “You mean at a gallery?” he asked.

  “No, all day, every day. The life was the art. Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano. I want a shower, you have to stand outside the tub.”

  “Were they lovers? A little rodeo? Take turns whipping the bad boy or girl?”

  “Don’t know. They sure weren’t lovers after. One year together and twenty years publicly bickering about it.”

  “Oh, I did see that. It was called My Parents’ Marriage.”

  “For my parents, it was Jim, Elaine and a rock,” Betty said, telling him what she knew of the contested family legend.

  As an architecture student in the early 1970s, Elaine studied within a roughly 4:1 ratio of men to women. For the first couple of years, she’d enjoyed the attention or at least the convenience of never having to look far for her next date. But by her last year she tired of meeting the same guy over and over again. Trevor or Neil or Roger, each one certain that he was a future starchitect, steadily filling a sketchbook with jutting this and towering that. Jim, a journalism student, was utterly different. Part new journalist, part town crier, part documentarian, he knew what to ask and when.

  “And remember,” Betty told Andrew, “this is decades before email. My dad wooed her with a pen.”

  One day, walking across campus toward the house she rented with Barb and Megan, Elaine once again rolled that powerful little word home around inside her mouth. She disapproved of the realtor’s smarmy swap of home for house, but she wasn’t always as enthusiastic as her classmates to constantly say space. A parking lot’s a space. A cramped, mouldy laundry room is a space. A closet’s a space. She was going to need more than just space.

  “Meg, Babs,” Elaine called out to her roommates as she stepped into their small house.

  Megan, another future teacher, was upstairs working on a Shakespeare essay. “Unless you’re a ready-formed paragraph, I don’t want to see you,” she called out.

  “Seriously. Get down here.”

  Barb shuffled out of another room. “Where’s the fire?”

  “Black Rock,” Elaine replied, grinning as she raised a stiff envelope.

  “Unless that’s a new Leonard Cohen album, I’m back up the stairs,” Megan said.

  “No, it’s Jim.”

  “Oh, love, big deal,” shot Barb.

  “I’ve lost two, three sentences for this,” Megan said, retreating.

  “His family has some land on a lake, a place they call Black Rock. He’s invited me there for Easter.” Elaine fluttered the envelope. “Written invitation.”

  Barb and Megan reversed their exits. Barb was first to snatch away the envelope. “My dearest Elaine. You have taken me to so many wonderful places, I would now like to do the same. (What, you finally get to come?) Please spend Easter with me at the black rock of Lake Iwannalayu — all right, all right — Apple Lake.”

  “Tick, tick,” said Megan. “Think it’s question time?”

  “It better be,” Elaine replied.

  77

  Waiting in the Quebec cemetery, he peels the bike with his knife, undoing in fifteen minutes the safe, preparatory work that took him three-quarters of an hour two weeks ago. The reflective See-Me tape, which he had wrapped in two vertical strips up and down the front forks, cuts away like pant legs to reveal supple calves beneath. From the rear forks the tape, once started with the knife, comes down more easily in his pinching thumbs, comes down, he can’t deny, like stockings off an extended leg. He does
not forget this image as he raises his yellow helmet to pare one long circumferential peel from its brow. From the backs of the pedals he scrapes at daubs of tape as tenacious as fungus on a horse’s hoof.

  Collecting the sloughed-off tape, he is caught in the classic waste management debate. His new desire to not be seen at night results in a small pile of useless waste. It’s easy enough to collect, but does he store it and carry it around with him? If he’s caught with it by police, is it evidence of evasive guilt, conspiracy to commit . . . hiding? Flight is guilt, especially night flight. Looking around at the expansive forest floor around him, he sees why so many Canadians are wasteful. What minuscule fraction of this soil would be needed to bury this little ball of tape? If it can go in a landfill there, why can’t it go in the land here? He uses his right shoe to dig a hole. By the time he’s done digging, the bottom of his shoe is entirely covered in dirt, including its sharp cleat. He buries the ball of reflective tape with both hands, hoping that the dirt he mounds with his hands will help him scour off some of the tape’s residual gum. Instead, his now filthy hands simply grow darker stripes of resinous dirt. Stamping down the mound of earth with his shoe, he watches a sharp imprint of the cleat roll into the damp spring soil.

  Rechecking his diminished gear is the only chore left before empty hours of waiting:

  • knife

  • wallet ($60 plus emerg $40, Visa, licence, health and organ donor cards)

  • saddlebag tool kit (tire patches, one emergency foil blanket, waterproof matches, two tiny bungee cords — previously useless)