The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  At the top, when the waiting Mark pointed to Andrew’s legs and said, “It’s all that hair slowing you down,” Andrew tried not to betray his alarm. (He’s more fit than you, not telepathic.) When he later thought he had closed a gap between them on the trail, Mark shot on ahead and slipped a corner. Cursing inwardly, bleeding sweat, Andrew cornered to find Mark pissing off a cliff. Mark had turned his side to the trail, not his back. The black rim of his lowered shorts spilled down square hips and strung twice-naked balls.

  “What, you didn’t know a razor could go this high?” Mark asked.

  Back on the trail, Mark took a brutal pace.

  Later that week, in the warm glow of the Kingston house, Andrew had started to tell Betty about this glimpse of Mark as she shaved his legs. His slick legs aroused her as much as him, so he’d told her that Mark took the razor even higher.

  “He showed you his balls?” she asked.

  “No, no.” Andrew’s lie surprised him. “No, he just mentioned it.” What was he hiding? Looking wasn’t doing. And Betty liked his gender-bending. Besides, wasn’t a same-sex experience monogamy’s Get Out of Jail Free card?

  “Hey, name part, will shave,” she offered. “Now can we get some sleep around here or are you going to start talking barrettes and scarves?”

  82

  Awaken is not really the verb for how Andrew rises from his forest hiding spot in Quebec to start his night ride. After hours of simply sweating and itching, of a boredom so total he had begun counting how often bugs crawled over him (count abandoned at fifty-two), of hunger and a hundred worries, he had, at most, slipped into a more fluid fear, a general anxiety with a low pulse. Bored or occasionally even dozing, he never lost track of the likelihood that he is being hunted. For prey, even sleep is a cower.

  Opening his eyes fully in the darkness of night, he’s a camp worker moving from bed to labour, a soldier on the rhythmed push. His lack of food spares him any camp chores, save for a piss. Here is the bike. The cleats make their familiar bite into the pedals.

  On this long night’s ride, the frame seems designed to isolate his gurgling stomach, a luggage rack to sling this empty bag. Then darkness and his spinning legs draw the hunger out of his stomach. A black cape of fear settles about his shoulders. Each knee slops through hunger.

  More than just his stomach notices the absence of the panniers. He’s been back on the road for less than two hours. With the Trans Canada Trail still incomplete, and its erratic quiltwork of linked local trails, he has decided to return to asphalt for his night run. Although he wants a road, the Trans-Canada Highway is too popular and too illuminated for his slip through the night. Instead he hopes to hitch the bike to national history. The Trans-Can runs parallel to the river at times, but the highway is much younger than the river. There must be older highways closer to the river. After all, the majority of the country’s population still lives within reach of the St. Lawrence or the Great Lakes served by it.

  In road time, he has been pannier-free for less than two hours. The bike is a carriage horse suddenly free from harness and team. Pulling cumbrously out of Halifax, what, eight days ago (just eight?), he’d been sloppy on the turns, amazed at each laden pannier’s mutinous gulp. Now he misses the long arcs of steering with the panniers. Sure, they made him slower and less nimble. They taxed his upper body as he resisted them thousands of times a day, but they also reassured him with their mass. Every turn they weighted showed his body that he was carrying a home, not just going home. Without the panniers, the handlebars have become a midnight switchblade flicking left or right with the slightest unevenness. Even a distant set of headlights sends tremors through the metal frame.

  The mere sight of the growing headlights has him checking the severity of the ditch and inching closer to the roadside gravel. He has already chosen his line into the ditch when he fully recognizes that he has stripped his bike of reflectors and now flies below the radar of visibility. The growing stain of a second pair of lights behind him doesn’t deter his return to the centre of the road. No reflectors wink between his handlebars or glow in the rear. No stroke pushes a glowing little bar on the front of each pedal. He cuts wide S-curves in the growing light, spins silently and privately in his dark envelope until his heels begin to glow.

  Idiot. The lights in his lane pick out the reflective heel patch he forgot to remove from each shoe, igniting them with a leaping, indicting conductivity he feels as a palpable shock. He races to the roadside and prays these nicked heels look like a scurrying coon. Enough light spills in from the approaching headlights to reveal the looseness of the roadside gravel and its steep slope into a rock-strewn ditch. His erratic unweighted front tire snags in the gravel he hasn’t properly anticipated by balancing his chest. Because the cleats dutifully keep his shoes locked into the pedals, most of the bike, not just its rider, begins to fly over the front handlebars. When the rear tire rises past the point where his shoulder should be, he lets go of the handlebars to meet the approaching, inclined ground. His padded gloves, like so much else, are back in Rivière-du-Loup, in vengeful or prosecuting hands. Only one foot disengages in time, so bike and body wind up in a deformed mule-kick of sharp angles. The caught downward calf is punctured on impact by at least one rock. The bracing hands don’t absorb enough force to spare his forearms and elbows from gash and smash. In this jumble of inclined pain, his first realization beyond ache is that each knee has been spared. Then there’s the blood.

  His right calf isn’t quite a hose of blood, but the puncture wound beside his shin does pump steadily. Lengthening trails of blood on each arm go unobserved a few minutes longer while he tries to swallow all the jagged pain and concentrate on the steady leak of blood coming from his shin. The passing spill of light stays his reflex to hop up in an attempt to walk off the pain.

  After the headlights fade, he feels the severity of the bleeding more than he sees it. Hopefully, the rivulets of blood on his forearms will seal with just time and dust. The bleeding in the oddly weightless-feeling leg won’t quit so easily.

  Removing his jersey he is hit by a wave of the post-orgasmic, cannabine reek he and Betty used to find daily under his arms. Bleeding in the cold night air, he raises an arm briefly to check his scent. Yes, unmistakably, there is the skunky, weedy smell he normally exudes immediately after orgasm. That smell is one reminder of Betty from the jersey. Removing her postcards from a jersey pocket is a second. As a bandage, the breathable, sweat-wicking jersey is inadequate, a failure over civilian cotton. He knots the shirt to the outside of the leg, but can see blood already sliding down his leg before he even grabs the bike. Now pain finds him, slices into him as he reaches for the flung half-novel. He rips out a small stack of pages to make an absorbent pad for the leg and reties the jersey around the paper bandage. Now he packs the knife in his saddlebag. He doesn’t like even looking at the postcards, let alone touching them. They could be left in the ditch. Burnt before he rides again. With one of the two tiny bungee cords, he lashes them to the pannier rack, images up.

  However thin and porous the jersey had felt in the night air, he now feels absolutely naked without it as he pushes his bare chest into the cold night.

  83

  When Pat left, Stan could still sit in the brown easy chair and manage a proper glass of Scotch. The chair, at least, had sturdy arms.

  However much it had claimed humility and contrition, Pat’s farewell letter was still the record of the victor, the glorious public monument with a jaw upturned and a fist raised in the air.

  If Andy had kept the kitchen drawers properly organized, there’d be a box of wooden matches in the junk drawer. Stan could pin the box under his left hand and, eventually, get one stiff match lit. Or he could ignite the letter on a stove burner. He knew they worked. But her letter took Andy hostage.

  The earthquake of divorce shook his land so thoroughly that he spent months convinced that her contrite letter was designed to be discovered by Andy. Have children and you no longer kno
w how much you will say or hear about yourself. Every family is a little KGB of eavesdroppers and information-selling. Pat’s farewell was a letter, not a speech. These words were designed to last. And to reach Andy, their mutual target. Each of them knew that Andy was still far from choosing where he would live. Pat had sent the letter to a house she had abandoned. Maybe she hoped it would be discovered.

  He could burn it in the kitchen sink then rinse away the ashes.

  And what of the letter she didn’t write, the motives she didn’t confess? Above all else, I want a lover, a second body, sweet annihilation.

  Go ahead, Pat, woo him with words. Two can play at that game.

  84

  In the eventful August before Betty moved in, Andrew wound up swimming naked with Mark. Every gesture either increased or decreased a view of hanging cock. Asking Mark about the gorilla tattooed on his shoulder, that would involve less cock, not more. Get him talking.

  “Our high-school wrestling team,” Mark explained. “But it’s more about freethinking, not team spirit or anything like that. Gorillas are vegetarians but strong enough to rip your arms off.”

  They’d gone riding despite a heavy heat and had mutually agreed to swing down to a section of brook with a few pools and half-submerged rocks.

  “Duncan, our coach, started with one question: Do you want to win or eat burgers? Wrestling’s all about weight.”

  “Yeah, in order for men to be anorexic we need the excuse of throwing each other to the ground.”

  Warm water curled around their pale, submerged hips and across their buzzing thighs before pouring over their knees into a greening pool. Warm, firm rock stretched beneath them.

  “That’s the struggle, strength versus weight. You wrestle weight. Whole sport’s full of guys living on nothing but Popsicles and water days before a match. Duncan laid out the math: you need maximum protein and minimum fat per mass unit. That’s never going to come from some animal that’s storing food on its body.”

  Each treed side of their tiny valley, the rocks coppered with sun and the water they wore in place of shorts allowed Andrew to half-glimpse a circuit running through him. Reflex, politeness, modesty or some other current sent his eyes away from Mark’s glistening chest, from the water curling over hip and fur.

  “Duncan wasn’t an animal lover, just efficient. In fact, he advocated lentils cooked in blood.”

  “In technical parlance I believe he’s known as a vampire.”

  “Most guys resisted. A hamburger tells you who’s lazy, who’s selfish. For me it was like a light went on. I wasn’t great when I started, but after a year on the beans I got what I wanted. The gorilla asks me what I really want.”

  Andrew then Mark rolled off the solid rock to sink into a pool of moving water. Heads and toes broke the gurgling stream as they floated one way then another. Floating on his back and reaching out with his feet for a snared log, Andrew submerged all but his nose and mouth to float fully. Smaller currents surrounded him as he pulled his torso to his heels and pushed it back again, bending his legs into angle brackets then straightening out over and over again, sack and balls swishing up then down in their own small tide. Mark could worry about turning away.

  The damp cycling clothes they’d left in the hot sun had nearly dried. As Mark dug his arms into his blue sleeveless jersey, Andrew nodded once more at the gorilla.

  “What do you want now that you’re done wrestling?”

  “We’re always wrestling something.”

  85

  Riding in the dark, he can smell the rain coming for miles. Despite a bodysuit of cold and sleeves and pant legs of sweat, despite racing stripes of blood, he feels wetness growing in the night, feels a slight smothering of the wind down his naked back. This dampness brushing cheek and knee is a piano’s tinkling prelude. First he expects a single poking finger of rain on his neck or a few potshots at his back to precede a machine-gun wave. No. The clouds crack open severely enough to dissolve earth from sky. Instantly he wears a skullcap, jacket and gaiters of frigid water. Cold expands across his back, growing from strips to bands to plates before reaching around for rib and nipple. The rain falls hard enough to bounce off the pavement, creating a second rain for his spinning shoes. Cold water squirms between his toes. Water gloves each finger, flies up his baggy shorts, straddles each hip. However temporarily, however speciously, the curtains of cold rain douse his burning crotch and draw attention away from his growling stomach. Cold replaces the inside of his body then expands its cavern of hunger with a frigid chisel.

  Thunder cracks through the valleys frequently enough that its waves and echoes combine to overwrite each valley and cut a new landscape of boom and roar. Lightning tears the sky left and right to seam a new, vertical world. Still pedalling within this wet avalanche, he worries that he might be a horizontal lightning rod, a ripe fin of conductivity. Metal wedges up his middle. He holds a metal bar in the rain and repeatedly throws one circuit switch after another with feet clamped into metal pedals that ride metal crank arms. Supposedly the rubber tires on a car protect it from lightning. A car contains much more metal, but it also lays much more rubber across the ground. Do his bike tires meet the necessary minimum in the rubber-to-metal ratio? Is grounding really a function of having rubber on the ground or a deceptively tempting verb? Once again he sees how this entire trip rides on two thin sleeves of air.

  Heavy, endless drops of rain flick his cheeks. This veil of driven rain and his defensive squinting hide the road. He pushes blindly into a road more felt than seen, relying on his legs to keep the hard road beneath him. A single lane of the highway is 120 times wider than his tires. For longer than ever before, he rides with his eyes closed, finding balance without seeing it. More than anything else, this blind balance would have been impossible for Stan. Daily, they had concentrated on keeping Stan’s arms moving, keeping him feeding himself and dressing himself as much as possible. His sense of touch, that inner terrain, eroded steadily but invisibly. With his feet internally numbed, Stan stood upright more by sight than by touch.

  Each time Andrew opens his eyes he checks for headlights raking this wet valley. There are none. The cars have pulled off. You can’t see the road. I don’t need to.

  86

  Pat endured nearly a year between her desktop defection and her supervision of Gordon’s mounting the two dimes that he had used to undo her boot into the front door frame of their new Ottawa house. Drill a shallow hole into each side of the door frame, then use the strongest glue you can find to hold up those two dimes. I will walk through this gamble every day.

  Leaving her job as a teacher to become what was essentially Gordon’s Ottawa secretary scared her senseless. She had plenty to resent about teaching — the neglected parenting she was expected to redress thanklessly, the annual repetition of adjective lessons, pioneer lessons, the life among small minds. As a teacher she had felt under-stimulated and underappreciated. Once, when her mother had shown Andy a composite photo of Pat’s graduating high-school class, Pat had taken the department store frame in her hands and counted off the women. Teacher. Nurse. Secretary. Teacher. Nurse. Secretary. How she had hated that crudely piercing trident. At least teaching meant university, although each of her parents (mother, how could you?) implicitly and explicitly clarified that finishing her degree was not the primary objective.

  Beneath the fatigue of the first few years of teaching there was genuine challenge and interest. The near-total independence, the steady performance. She had discovered depths of strength, discipline and humanity she had never so thoroughly plumbed. After a few caffeinated years, though, she wondered if she’d been confusing career satisfaction with trench survival. Unquestionably, teaching was the most complex, varied and sustained challenge she had ever met. Having met it, though, she had to ask how much it could change, evolve; how much could she? Teachers are field soldiers, not parade soldiers: fit but tired, malnourished but battle-tough. Where was the retraining? The fresh assignment? Sparring
with ten-year-olds brought her into shape, but what then? A lifetime of small teeth and secreting hormones? There were no promotions to strive for, no awards to covet. A teacher she began; a teacher she’d remain. Thanks, but no (never enough) thanks.

  Gordon, I’m smarter than the shoppers and breeders in the staff room. I’m smarter than your wife. Damn it, we both know I’m smarter than you.

  Leaving husband, child, home and job, Pat literally drove away from her life to go work with Gordon, and she treated the three hundred kilometres between Ottawa and Kingston like an ocean. At first she wished they could have been farther away from Kingston. Be the MP for a Prairie wind patch or a Maritime ghost town. Drive from the fowl suppers to our foul bed.

  She spent less than a month lying to Stan (until after the election: who was she any more?), while Gordon took six months to leave Sandra and Ben. If education is indeed change, what’s more educational than divorce? Love should be courageous, not safe. Gordon, your son will survive your leaving if you let him. Mine must.

  On those early, interminable weekends Gordon spent “home with his family” (that land mine of a phrase), she hated that she could be with him in under three hours, be with that skin she couldn’t stop feeling, that body he was sharing with another woman. There were a few impulsive nights with him in her car in a Kingston parking lot, all this before cellphones or email. Sandra’s icy voice on their home phone. Gordon’s back-seat oscillation between passion and distance. He’d be in someone else’s bed while she wound back to Ottawa with the smell of him, of them, still thick in the car.

  He would joke about Sandra’s equine stupidity, her blunders at dinner, her garish taste. And then he’d pack bags for Kingston, load shirts she had ferried to the cleaners.

  “What do I do here, Gordon? Leave another job? Another man? I’ve given you time enough. What you call difficulty, I call one in every port. Her or me. If you don’t choose, I will.”