Trevor later joked, “You should have seen the other guy.”
On day seven, Yusef arrived early at his concession stand to have some quiet time before the morning rush. The subway was usually dead until around 6:30 and so he could sit and think and read the newspaper and eat the lunch his wife had packed for him before she went to bed. Often, eating the dhal and chapatti or egg salad sandwich was the first thing he did in the morning, right after he ate his breakfast.
Now, Yusef looked up and saw Mike on the other side also looking up, and between them were many, many, bristling, huge and possibly starving coyotes.
“What the fuck?” Mike was thinking how the Kevlar wouldn’t do dick in this situation and then regretted thinking dick.
“I’m dialling 911,” replied Yusef.
“Don’t you carry a piece?”
“What’s a piece?”
“A gun, yahoo.”
“Yahoo? My name is—”
“—Yusef.”
“Why would I carry a gun?”
“I thought all you guys carried weapons.”
“Shopkeepers?” Yusef felt the sandwich pressing up against his oesophagus, and regretted his indulgence. “It’s illegal,” he managed.
“Jesus wept,” said Mike.
The cops and the fire department showed up and made such an unholy racket running down the stairs that the animals jumped the turnstile and hid underground. The authorities shut the system down for two hours while they pretended to find and evacuate them. Fact: they never saw one coyote. This delay was especially annoying to Hilary who was one hour and twenty-six minutes late for work. Note: through the entire event Mike had “Bohemian Rhapsody” wailing into his left ear. He needed to hear the lyric in looping glory, so he’d put the song on continual repeat. How could one song carry so much truth?
When the cops and the press had finally dispersed, Mike looked over at Yusef, and said, “Sheesh! Yusef!”
“I know,” said Yusef. “We made the news.”
It was funny what let you really know a person, Mike thought. It was weird and uncanny and funny. He crossed the floor to give props to Yusef.
“Buddy!”
“Yusef,” Yusef reminded him again.
“Oh, yeah!” Mike hadn’t really smiled—really truly smiled—in years, and now he beamed.
Judy raised her eyebrows when Hilary recounted the subway debacle, but Danny took it in his stride. Hilary got busy wiping down the ellipticals. If she looked closely some of them seemed to have flakes of skin on them, so she tried not to look closely. As soon as she had the opportunity, she sidled into the change room, sat herself down where she wouldn’t have to witness the parade of denuded privates, took out her device, texted: Alleged coyotes in TTC.
Reply: OMG.
Alleged! Trevor put his cellphone down and danced around with the dogs. He loved that woman. Tonight, he thought, tonight would be the night.
“No pets,” said Mike. He had pushed the booth open and was coming out to stop Hilary. “You hear me? I don’t wanna tell you this again. I don’t wanna have to call the police again. Did you read the newspaper? We covered for you here. Me and Yusef over there—we covered for you.”
There were scores of dogs following Hilary from Dovercourt station, and these were the ones who had managed to break through the security at that end. The rest were probably on their way to her apartment door or waiting in the park. There were no coyotes as far as she could tell but if she was honest with herself there had been shadows and rank odours—wild rancid smells she could not account for. She stopped for Mike and asserted, “They aren’t mine. I’m telling you.”
“They come with you. They go with you. I’ve seen you feed them. I’ve seen them lick you. They’re yours. And they can’t come down any more.” Mike looked over at Yusef in the hope of getting some basic support and was pissed to see Yusef look away. “Yo, Yusef!” he said. “Support!” and then Yusef lifted his eyes and damned if he didn’t look scared before he dropped them again.
“They aren’t mine,” said Hilary. “I don’t even own a leash. These are city dogs. I can’t help it if they follow me. I can’t do anything about anything.” And Hilary pushed past Mike.
Mike held onto the sleeve of her jacket. “Admit you don’t like this,” he said.
“I have no opinion whatever.” Hilary pursed her lips, glared. “Call the city. Or the police.”
“Yeah, we’ve seen how well that works.”
“Open your eyes,” she quipped, and Mike thought he recognized something and shut up. She added, “Let me go.”
Mike gasped. Queen, he thought. No way. He let go of the fabric of her jacket, his eyes widened and he tilted his head like a dog for a bone. “Oh,” he said. “Oh!”
Hilary smiled, sang a few bars of the “Scaramouche” section until Mike nodded. She got him. Really got him. Cool. Nobody had ever got him.
Trevor led Hilary down Annette, through Baby Point—the swank houses had old money ivying around them—and then down an old rotten stairwell to the thin green belt along the Humber River. It smelled like mould and earth down there, and fish. The dogs followed, as did car horns honking, for the animals did not wait for lights.
“I thought you meant a walk in High Park.”
“The dogs know it so well, I thought I’d bring you all here.”
The sun was pressing the horizon when Trevor finally stopped in a treed dip in the landscape, the dogs edging them, their coats aflame with sunset and Hilary’s face turned up wondering.
“You’re stopping.”
He was standing very close to her, the dogs getting jealous, nuzzling her legs and pushing the two of them apart as well as they could. Mangy jumped up and tore a superficial line down Hilary’s cheek. “Down, Mangy. Laikas, sit!”
Then, briefly, except for the monkey jabber of squirrels, it was as quiet as it ever got in an urban park.
Trevor put something into her hand, too shy to even look at her, and when she saw it was a box—that famous Birk’s blue and velveteen that every girl but Hilary knew to yearn for and to covet—she opened it, and there nestled in a little pink velvet cleave was the prettiest ring she had ever seen.
“Trevor?”
“Gosh,” he said. “Gosh.” From now on, it would be this: Hilary, the dogs and him. He was so nervous! Trevor flung his arms up, in celebration, and asked, “What do you say?” He could hear the soft moaning of the coyotes, a kind of gorgeous, primal soundtrack to this moment.
She had the ring on and was marvelling at the way the diamonds glittered in the waning light. “I say thank you!”
His smile had dwindled; he’d never felt more serious. He said, “But will you marry me?”
“What?”
He raised his eyebrows, nodded. They would later walk out of this park, and either way, he thought, he would not look back. It was a promise he made to himself. Either way, she was his girl and he would not look back. So beautiful, she was; he only had to look at her. . . .
Hilary hadn’t thought about marriage before. She had neither considered what a wonderful covenant it might be, nor what an immense commitment and responsibility. She felt something dark and sober pressing in on her, and then she looked to the dully glinting precious stones encircling her finger. The sun was a smear of matte orange on the horizon, and the night air began to chill her to the bone.
The dogs, tired, or perhaps sensing her concern emptying out into the waning light, had all sat or lain down and were arranged around her, sentinels, panting, watching. From time to time they whined, or turned their heads toward the coyotes just outside the sight lines, lurking in shadows, their yips now accelerating toward strangled, deformed howls. Hilary looked around and down several times, the ring, the dogs, the ring, the dogs, and then she bit her bottom lip, looked up at Trevor and said, “OK, sure, why not?”
on the many uses of cedar
GEOFFREY W. COLE
Tomorrow, Fanny’s husband will hit her for the fir
st time in their short marriage. Fanny will relive the cold November day he hits her twenty-seven times. Her husband will only remember it once.
This is the day Fanny will repeat twenty-seven times:
A great crack will wake her alone in their cabin on the side of the mountain above North Vancouver. Warm beneath her deerskin and wool blankets, she will elect to remain in bed and will not notice that the flume, whose constant watery babble fills every waking moment, is silent.
Her husband will return to the cabin with one of his wool shirts that she rinsed in the flume the day before. He will tell her: “How many times have I told you not to do the laundry in the flume?”
Then he will hit her.
After he has gone, she will look at the daguerreotype on the wall of the two of them taken May 7th, 1895, their wedding day in San Francisco, and she will realize that the mountain did something to her husband. She will see that the mountain stripped away the boyish fat on his face to expose dark crevices and gullies. She will see that the mountain seeded thick stubble on his chin no razor will remove. She will see that the mountain poured its innumerable icy streams over his heart that scoured away everything but hard stone. She will see that in the two short years since their wedding the mountain remade her husband.
When her husband leaves, she will cook breakfast—always oatmeal with molasses and raisins—and she will carry it up the slick skid road to her husband’s men. The braying of the camp mule, Boris, will lead her to the men, though after the third day, she will have the route memorized.
The foreman Marty is a half-Japanese logger who lost his left eye to a faulty sawmill blade and a bottle of rum before he joined her husband’s crew. His one eye will see her coming and he will call the men down from their work, which is a tree they felled that morning. Fanny will never have seen a larger tree; even the redwoods she saw as a child will be dwarfed by this grey monster, and redwoods are called the biggest trees in the world. The men who scamper along the huge tree trimming branches are also Japanese, though on the first day Fanny will not know this; she calls them Chinamen.
Marty will have been drinking rum and will say: “What happened to your face?” when he gets his ladle of oatmeal.
“Slipped on an icy stair,” Fanny will say.
She will feed the Chinamen, who she thinks are part of the mountain’s conspiracy to remake her husband. His crew used to be mixed white and Celestial, but the whites thought they should be paid at least three times what her husband paid the Chinamen, and when he refused, they walked off the job. Only Marty received a raise as he was the only one who could talk to the Chinamen, and he stayed on the mountain.
After Marty and the Chinamen have eaten and Fanny has fed the mule Boris an apple she brought for him, her husband will walk out of the woods and demand that she bring breakfast up to the men at the sawmill and then return to her chores.
After she’s fed the silent Chinamen at the sawmill, she will descend the mountain with the empty pot. She will draw water for the laundry from the flume.
The flume looks like a V from head-on. She thinks the flume looks like a snake from the side. It crawls up the mountain on cedar stilts to its source, a mountain stream. At the source, the men who built the flume, her husband and his crew, divert the stream down the v-shaped notch. The flume becomes an artificial stream they use to send bolts of lumber down the mountain to make shingles and siding for the growing cities below. The water is very cold. Her husband’s bosses built a cabin beside the flume, away from the main camp, so that someone will always watch the flume and make sure the bolts flow, because sometimes bolts jam in the flume, sometimes tree branches fall across the flume, and sometimes, in particular the day before this day repeated itself twenty-seven times, Fanny loses a piece of laundry that she rinses in the flume and the shirt catches on a cedar seam, freezes, accumulates debris, and causes the flume to jam.
Fanny will hate the flume.
Her other chores will include mending a leaky cedar shingle on the roof, fixing a broken cedar step leading up to their home, sitting on a cedar rocking chair and darning her husband’s socks, and sweeping cedar sawdust out of the cabin. Everything is made of cedar because cedar doesn’t rot.
Fanny will hate cedar.
A rain storm will start every afternoon. When it is time to cook dinner, Fanny will climb back up the mountain to the main camp where the men sleep and will go to the kitchen cabin, also made of cedar. By then the rain storm will have turned to a thunder storm. She will make dinner, a stew of salted pork, potatoes and onions, and she will feed each of them. Marty, much drunker than that morning, will crack jokes about the poor quality of her cooking: “Tasted better food that had already been eaten and puked up by someone else.” The jokes will not be the same every day.
When she comes around with tea at the end of the meal, her husband will reach into his jacket and will pull out a cone more beautiful than anything she has ever seen. Copper-coloured and semi-transparent, the cone won’t look like pine, or fir, or cedar; maybe a combination of all three. She will accept the cone, and she will think that maybe the mountain hasn’t finished remaking her husband.
After she cleans all the dishes, she will walk home alone through the storm with only lightning to guide her way. She will find her husband entering numbers into his ledger. She will be unable to speak to him about what happened that morning because her father never let any of his five daughters talk back to him, and because she will be afraid of the man the mountain remade. She will watch him writing and she will try to use the force of her mind to get her husband to look up and speak to her, but he won’t. She will try to get the fire going bright enough to chase the chill from the cedar cabin by burning small pieces of cedar, but the chill won’t leave.
Thunder will rattle the walls of their cabin. He will climb into bed first. She will wait and hope that his body warms the cold sheets, but it never does. The mountain has drained all heat from his limbs. She will crawl in beside him and together they will both flinch every time another crack of thunder shakes the cabin and fills the air with cedar dust.
Then lightning will flash so bright that it shines through the solid wood walls of their home.
When the lightning recedes, it will take everything with it, and the day will begin again.
Not every day will be the same.
On the second day, Fanny will wake up to the great crack and find that her cheek isn’t bruised. She will assume she had a terrible, vivid dream. When her husband enters the cabin with the same frozen laundry that jammed the flume and hits her again, she will wonder if maybe she can see the future, like her eldest sister claimed about their dead mother. She will attend to her chores, the same chores she attended to the day before. As thunder peals that night while she and her husband lie flinching beside each other on a mattress made of cedar sawdust, she will pray that tomorrow is a new day.
On the third day, Fanny will rise without a bruise and her husband will re-make it for her. On the third day, Fanny will realize that she is being forced to relive this day, this one day when her husband hits her.
When she brings breakfast to the men, one-eyed Marty will look at her bruised face and say: “Wait, let me guess. You slipped on an icy stair.”
“Do you remember it too?” she will ask. “Does this day keep happening?”
“Same day,” he will say. “Same shit.” And then he will drink rum from a flask.
Fanny will think that if she can stop her husband from hitting her, she might be able to make the day stop repeating.
On the fourth day, she will rise out of bed the moment the great crack wakes her. She will rush through the woods beside the flume on its cedar stilts. She will trip and smash her shin so that it bleeds. She will find her husband at the spot where his frozen shirt and the debris it accumulated jams the flume. She will apologize, she will beg him not to hit her, but the mountain remade the man she loves, and he will knock her down. For the rest of that day, she will remain in bed, an
d her shin will bleed through the sheets.
Her shin will be unmarked the next day.
On the fifth, sixth, and seventh days, she will remain in bed. These days are the same. Her husband will arrive with the frigid laundry, he will hit her even when she burrows beneath the covers. Then she will lie in bed and wait. Ravens outside will clack their beaks at the same time each day. Rain will arrive on schedule, and it will come pouring through the shingle she doesn’t mend. Her husband will arrive before dinner and she will claim she doesn’t feel well. He will tell her: “You can stay in bed today, but this can’t happen tomorrow.”
It will happen tomorrow.
After these three days in bed, she will rise to the sound of the great crack. She will wonder: is it the sound of my husband’s fist on my face? Is it the sound to the great grey tree falling? Is it the sound of the world splitting in two? Is it the drums of Hell? Am I dead?
Her husband will hit her and she will make breakfast. She will carry it up the mountain. When she finds the men beside the massive tree, Boris the mule will be the first at her side, and the beast will nose her pocket for the apple she’s forgotten.
Marty will push the mule out of the way.
“Damn-me but you were right,” he will say. “This day’s repeating. What in the hell?”
She will take his full mug of rum and drink it in one gulp. She will feel warm for the first time since they moved to the mountain. Her husband will walk out of the woods and send her to feed the men at the sawmill. Once breakfast is done, she will return to the cedar cabin, crack open her husband’s shipping chest and find the bottle of port his uncle gave them on their wedding night. The sweet wine will keep her warm through the afternoon as she stares at the daguerreotype on the wall.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 24