It was nearly five a.m. when I asked for our bill. The little man excused himself to go to the bathroom and never came back. I asked around the bar for “the little man in the hat.” No one knew where to find him, but they did caution that the little man was a capoeira master, an adulterer and a cocaine dealer on the lam. When he skipped up next to me on the walk home to ask me over for a drink, I forgot all about the warnings given and demanded he pay me his share of the bill. He called me cheap. I said he was a thief.
“I want to take you home,” he countered.
“I want to kill your dog,” I said. It was a pitiful rebuttal from a forty word vocabulary, and it stunned us both.
“What?” he asked.
“Dog. You. The same. You’re not my friend.” He took a minute to size me up, pivoted on his sandals and sashayed into the dawn. Given the drunken circumstances, I considered the drama we shared rather insignificant.
It has taken four altercations since that night, with numerous pokes to the chest and six cigarette burns to my hammock, for me to realize that the little man saw the entire evening much differently. A poke may seem like a juvenile assault, but a poke into a bony bit hurts and an angry poke can bruise for weeks. This silly poking business has become a pattern between us. There are variations to the routine but the conclusion remains the same. He will poke, push or mock me and then ask for a kiss. It’s now a tradition. The bar scarcely comes to gawk anymore. Without the crowd, his threats have lost their theatrics and become rather sullen. “You’re in my town,” he stated the last night we met, “and you’re not wanted.” The barman reminded him that he wasn’t from here but a city six hours away, with a wife and son awaiting his return, now six months overdue.
Theresa points again across the crowd. “There won’t be any fighting tonight.” We often make wagers on these fits of his. I tried for the longest time to avoid him, but in a town as small as this there aren’t many places to hide. I’ve come to rely on luck. Theresa taps me on the shoulder and says we should go before the gathering thins and leaves us exposed. She invites me to her shop, to cut a piece of cake and watch me eat it. We sit in shared gratitude: a lover of strays and a lover of sweets. We drink red wine with our chocolate and she goes to great lengths to set the table for three. For in a town as small as this, she tells me, one has to rely on hope.
The room is tiny and cluttered and filled with her scent. It’s the smell that perfume emulates—the primal glory of spices in the heat. It’s the kitchen of someone else’s mother that makes you hungry, brings water to your mouth and eyes. It’s something that you want without knowing what it is.
We part ways for a nap, meet again for some wine, and by two a.m. Theresa wants to dance. The bars in this town leak onto the street; the outside often more festive than the party within. Tonight it has taken us twenty minutes to get inside the door. We’re waved over to a table full of familiar faces that Theresa kisses two to three times, cheek to cheek as if choreographed. I kiss indiscriminately, grazing the neck occasionally, the forehead, the neglected temple or on the lips when my confusion infects the crowd. I’ve worked in this bar in exchange for sandwiches and drinks since the first week I arrived. With four bosses the odds are rather secure that I’ll be in favour with at least one of them on any given night. Tonight they tell me to join the dancers, and during slow songs they fill me with drinks. The little man finds me in the hour when I stop keeping count. He says he wants to kill me. There is a sadness to him. He gives the impression that we have indeed reached our end.
“Do what you want,” I answer. “But tell me why.” I hadn’t thought to ask him that before, to treat him as if he was sane. “You don’t have a reason, do you?”
“I do,” he says.
“Then what is it?” The sight of us conversing has attracted a crowd. He takes a step toward me, close enough for me to make out each word, close enough for the group behind me to hear.
I KISS INDISCRIMINATELY, GRAZING THE NECK OCCASIONALLY, THE FOREHEAD, THE NEGLECTED TEMPLE OR ON THE LIPS WHEN MY CONFUSION INFECTS THE CROWD.
“Because you save to travel,” he spits, then pauses, “and we save to eat.”
I wish he had poked me. I wish he had thrown me to the ground only to ask for a kiss. This minute is much too long for me. The bar is waiting for my redemption, and my brain sits there, between us, looking up at me from the floor. I’m touched, saved, brought to my senses by the white sleeve of Theresa. Theresa who doesn’t believe in hate, who swears to all who will listen that spiteful words are merely those of unrequited love.
“Save to eat?” she breathes his words. She waits, there on the pedestal I built for her, and stays the execution. “Then let us eat well.”
She takes my man by the hand and leads him onto the floor. I don’t see either one of them again. It has been two days and I’ve decided to move on. I’ve found a ride to the big city six hours away. I pass by Theresa’s shop to give thanks and kiss her goodbye, but I’m stopped at her door by two voices coming from inside. I place a note on her flowerpot and leave the little town in the middle of the night. We drive past my pousada, past the bars and the barmen taking down chairs and preparing for the night, past the beaches and the dune. The capoeira boys will be taking their showers now, Leo will be swimming in his dreams, and Theresa will be telling a story over chocolate cake at a table set for three.
Unable to shake the mantra of “better there than here,” Gillian Meiklem is as much a wilful transient at home in BC and Alberta as she is travelling the continents.
One has to wonder how the fish keep abreast of the latest fads.
013Destination: Canada
LOCAL RULES
Brad Smith
The Writer is always the first up. The Steelmaker will argue this point but he will be wrong. The Writer is always the first up. There are a number of pat reasons that can be applied to this: perhaps the Writer simply requires less sleep than the others, or maybe he doesn’t sleep well in a strange bed.
In reality, it is suspected that the others sleep the deep sleep of the clear of conscience while the Writer, for reasons which will certainly not be addressed here, enjoys no such luxury.
Besides, a day here on Lake Nipissing is a remarkable thing, and getting up at dawn is a part of that.
The group, a ragtag assortment of occasional sportsmen in their thirties and forties, spends a week annually at this camp. Lake Nipissing is a perfect little lake, positioned in what is known as Ontario’s “near north,” a third of the way between the pretense of Toronto and the polar bears of James Bay. The group has been coming here for two decades now. They return because they must, it seems. Unlike Papa’s Paris, Nipissing’s feast is not moveable in the least.
Upon rising, the Writer drinks coffee and watches the surface of the lake out the window as he waits for the others to awaken, not yet thinking of food. His stomach sleeps longer than his head.
The Auto Worker is usually next up, rousing himself from the nest he has fashioned out of blankets and underwear and fishing tackle in the corner of the west bedroom, leaving the double bed to the long-slumbering Hockey Player. The Auto Worker is thick and muscular, with a large balding head and heavy wire-rimmed spectacles. He has a habit of walking around the cottage stark naked; his body is completely covered with a bristly blond-ish fur, which gives him the look of a large koala bear. Eucalyptus trees being damn near extinct in northern Ontario, the Auto Worker usually breakfasts on pickerel fillets, fried in bacon grease.
The Writer will walk down to the dock while the naked Auto Worker sizzles and sears, will move down the hill, past the main house, a few auxiliary buildings, and the canoes leaning up against the pines on the hill. Most days he will find the camp dog, a golden retriever of considerable years, on the dock, watching in the water for signs of the smallmouth bass who nest on the pebbly lake bottom around and beneath the docks. The bass are fat and sassy and they hover over their hatching grounds like gilled mother hens. The retriever, when spotting
one, is fairly beside herself in her desire to leap in after the fish. She is all nervous energy, raised up on her toes, her entire body quivering in anticipation as she does everything short of diving in. But she never does. Year after year, the Writer has watched her watching the bass, driving herself to distraction and yet never making her move—it’s as if she agreed a long time ago that this is a matter of turf, and she has resigned herself to the honouring of that agreement. Perhaps in her most satisfying of sleeps, she dreams of a morning when she wanders down to see the smallmouth actually lounging on top of the dock and then, by God, all bets are off.
LAKE NIPISSING IS A PERFECT LITTLE LAKE, POSITIONED IN WHAT IS KNOWN AS ONTARIO’S “NEAR NORTH,” A THIRD OF THE WAY BETWEEN THE PRETENSE OF TORONTO AND THE POLAR BEARS OF JAMES BAY.
By the time the Writer wanders back up the hill to the cabin, the Steelmaker will be up and he will have encouraged the Auto Worker to cover up. The Steelmaker is a take-charge guy and he soon has the kitchen humming. He is the smartest one in the cabin. He is twice as smart as everyone else but only half as smart as he thinks. It’s a combination that seems to work. While cooking breakfast, he will periodically poke his head into the bedroom and shout at the Hockey Player to get up.
Which eventually the Hockey Player does. The Hockey Player is a voracious and slow eater. The rest of the group sits and watches the feeding process, impatient to get on with the first half of the day’s activity, which is golf.
Clear Springs Golf Course is located south of Astorville, on a gravel road in the backwoods, a little eighteen-hole gem of a course cut precisely into the heart of the Canadian Shield. Porcupines are as common as birdies on this track, and the unsuspecting hacker who arrives without bug spray will soon become acquainted with a particularly bloodthirsty strain of black fly, whose bite would put your average pit bull to shame.
The course is run by a French Canadian family, the distaff side including the three lovely daughters usually featured in farmer’s-daughters jokes. But these women are nobody’s punchlines. As hard as the Precambrian rock on which they were weaned, they are more than a match for a hungover crew of misfits from the south of the province. (It is quite likely that the women suspect anyone hailing from south of Weber’s hamburger joint on Highway 11 of being a little on the soft side anyway.)
Heading for the first tee, the group watches cautiously for telltale signs of Dwayne. On their first visit to the course, several years earlier, they were teeing off as a threesome, when the pines suddenly parted and Dwayne strolled out onto the teebox, like Meriwether Lewis just returned from the West. Dwayne announced that he was looking for a game, although where exactly he’d been looking was questionable, the area he’d just emerged from being one inhabited by bears, skunks, porcupines and raccoons. The group, courteous to a fault, welcomed him along.
Dwayne is long on information pertaining to his expertise in golf and short on any other aspects of his life. He reveals that he is from the nearby town of Callander and not currently employed, as he is working on his “thesis,” the subject of which remains a mystery. There is somewhat less mystery surrounding his skill on the links. Teeing off on the second hole, Dwayne launches a screaming hook that flies so long and high and left that it sails over the road that borders the course and lands, presumably, somewhere just north of Lake Ontario. Dwayne tees another ball, hacks it down the fairway and then announces to the group that due to a “local rule” there is no penalty assessed for his first shot. Over the course of the day, several such “local rules” crop up, basically every time Dwayne loses a ball or hits a clunker out of bounds. It is quickly assumed that Dwayne’s thesis is not on ethics.
It is Dwayne who introduces the group to the actual spring that lends the course its name. After unleashing a slice off number eight tee that would make Jack the Ripper blush, Dwayne watches the ball soar far to the right, his head cocked, listening the way a cocker spaniel listens for the can opener. When he hears the splash, he turns to the group.
“Come on,” says he. “And bring your canteens.”
Alas, the group has forgotten its canteens, along with its Winchesters, lariats and spurs, but it follows along. Dwayne leads the group through a grove of scrub oak to the edge of a large pond. The pond is fed by a two-inch steel pipe, which has been tapped into the underground spring. Dwayne is kneeling beside the pipe, and yes, he is holding a canteen.
“This is the best water in the north,” he announces. “And as cold as ice. It must be a hundred degrees.”
Presumably, Dwayne’s thesis is not on weights and measures, either.
After playing the front nine, the group stops at the clubhouse for lunch. The featured item on the menu is the Hound Dog, which consists of a large wiener on a bun, the wiener butterflied flat and filled with ham and melted cheese, and the whole thing grilled to a gooey state of what Dagwood Bumstead would surely call perfection. The proper way to order a Hound Dog, the Steelmaker has decided, is to howl like a lovesick coyote at the top of one’s lungs. The management has grudgingly come to accept this method of placing an order, and when the whole group opts for the special, the result is a cacophony as blood-curdling as anything Céline Dion has ever recorded.
The group arrives back at camp at around four o’clock, having stopped in Callander for bait, liquor, newspapers, beer, bread, lottery tickets and ice, and begins to prepare for the night fish. Coolers and bait and tackle are loaded into the boats. Coveralls and jackets for the cool nights. Rain gear. Whatever miracle fish-catching gizmo the Hockey Player has purchased at the bait shop.
There is considerable talk all the week long about the most efficient colours to use in the angling process, whether one is using jigs or lures, spinners or harness. In this, there seems to be a bizarre connection to the world of fashion. Several years ago, it was accepted as fact that hungry pickerel were enamoured of anything chartreuse. As a result, men who until that point in their lives would have actually questioned the sexual orientation of anyone using the word “chartreuse,” were now tossing the word around like a Frisbee. Since then, the chartreuse phase seems to have faded—each year another colour is the rage. One has to wonder how the fish manage to keep abreast of the latest fads, especially when the lack of sunlight at the depth of sixty or seventy feet pretty much makes one colour indiscernible from another anyway.
For the record, the Writer is convinced that fish, like most of God’s creatures, will, when presented with food, eat when they’re hungry, fast when they’re not, and not give a damn whether the food is red, yellow, green or plaid. The Writer further believes that men who are already jigging, rigging, quaffing, listening to the Jays game on the radio, and talking philosophy are just a tad busy to be fretting over the sartorial condition of their bait.
MEN WHO UNTIL THAT POINT IN THEIR LIVES WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY QUESTIONED THE SEXUAL ORIENTATION OF ANYONE USING THE WORD “CHARTREUSE,” WERE NOW TOSSING THE WORD AROUND LIKE A FRISBEE.
A Lake Nipissing pickerel is not the lunker fish found in the Bay of Quinte or Lake Erie. Most weigh in at between two and three pounds, and they provide a beautiful example of their species, varying in hue from a pale to brilliant yellow. In a frying pan, they have no equal—their bigger kin from the south are as tough and as tasteless as your average work boot, due in part, one suspects, to sustained marination in polluted waters.
The best time of the day is dusk, with just the right chop and a few fish on the stringer, and two or three old and genuine friends in the boat, talking a lot about nothing or talking a little about everything and not caring, finally, if the fish are biting or not. Late at night there exists on the lake something liberating, something which suggests that the usual rules don’t apply here, that this is neutral ground and that all that matters is the company and the conversation and the brilliant sky to the west.
Upon the demise of a clear day on the lake, the anglers are treated to as beautiful a sunset as is found on the planet. The sun hangs suspended over the water, sinking s
lowly from the western sky into the western shore as if being extinguished in the lake. As it sets, there appears a shimmering corridor of red light across the water, wide as a prairie field. The corridor recedes and narrows as the sun dips farther into the horizon until it disappears altogether, like an eyelid descending over an eye.
As if God has decided that he will end this glorious day not with a nod.
But a wink.
In his twenties, Brad Smith travelled around Canada, the southern States and in Africa, searching for the spirits of Jack Kerouac, Jack London and Jack Daniel’s and working as a farmhand, bartender, truck driver, teacher and railroad signalman. His second novel, One-Eyed Jacks, was nominated for the Dashiell Hammett Award and Arthur Ellis Award and was optioned for film; his third novel, All Hat, will be published in the United States and Canada in the spring of 2003. He works as a carpenter and a writer in Dunnville, Ontario.
Piranha’s jaw necklace.
014Destination: Brazil
A BRAZILIAN NOTEBOOK
Andrew Pyper
February 8
São Paulo
Smashed bottle of raspberry-like juice (they call it guarana) on the marble floor of the airport looks like spilled blood.
The city seems to have been built overnight in 1960 with no changes made since, except perhaps for the newsagent stands selling hardcore porn on every corner (newspapers are a sideshow). Even the clothing the women wear is perfectly uniform, as though they are on their way to jobs involving the making of porn: supertight white pants, heels, push-up bras and tank tops.
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