The Book of Stanley

by Todd Babiak

  “That’s terrific.” The woman dropped her shirt on the Persian rug–her stage. “This was my childhood dream too, to dance naked in front of slouching strangers.”

  “We’re damn lucky people.”

  “God should strike us down for our happiness.” The woman pulled her sweatpants down. Underneath, she wore a pair of pink thong panties. “You want me to take these off now or slowly, as part of the show?”

  “Slowly.”

  “Good choice. High heels on or off?”

  “Definitely off.”

  “Another good choice, and a rare one.” The woman pressed play on a small CD player that was also an alarm clock, and began to sway. It was contemporary R&B: a bass line, a drum machine, and a woman singing about someone’s baby. As the music was not very loud, Kal could hear the dancer breathing. Her exhalations were slightly raspy, due to an apparent cold or lung disorder. Kal could also hear the cartilage in her knees as she placed her hands on the arms of his chair and bent low. Her hair was so black in the dim light that it shone blue.

  “You believe in God?” he said.

  The woman stood up and slipped her thumbs under the waist string of her thong as she moved her hips. “What do you mean?”

  “It isn’t a trick question.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  The woman turned around, so her bare behind faced Kal. She bent over and looked up at him between her legs. “I think he feels sorry for us. He can see we’re suffering.”

  “Us?”

  “You and me, everyone. Us. We’re pathetic, don’t you think?” The woman stood up and gestured with her arms as part of her dance, indicating here and now. “Exhibit A.”

  “Right.”

  The woman lowered herself backwards, limbo-like, until her palms hit the rug. Then she extended her pelvis upward. A yoga move, Kal figured. The woman’s hair brushed the floor. “For an extra fifty I’ll let you touch me.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “You betcha, especially right now. But…”

  “But what, hockey boy?”

  “I’m trying to change my life here. Paying to touch strippers doesn’t fit into my new plan.”

  The woman shifted so she was on her hands and knees, a classic. Even in the dim light Kal noticed her shaving rash. Her rash and her scratchy voice, her cavalier use of the phrase strike us down, it was all endearing. She moved with the song for a while, which had given way to a “guest performance” by a rapper. The dancer went flat on her front and shifted, with a small grunt, to her back. She opened her legs, signalling that the performance was nearly over. “So what are you doing at Showgirls?”

  “My friend Gordon figured it would cheer me up.”

  “Gordon Yang?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a sweet guy. He understands tuition costs these days. Gordon always pays the fifty bucks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The woman closed her legs and the song ended. It was silent in the room but for the distant thump of the sound system and the poppy consonants of the DJ. Kal stood up and extended a hand to help her up, and she took it. “You aren’t supposed to stand.”

  “Again, sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Who does?” The woman coughed and extended her hands toward the ceiling for a moment, turned her head from side to side. More yoga.

  They were only a few feet apart now. Kal had spent fifty dollars on dumber things. There was a sheen on the woman’s stomach, from oil, perhaps, or sweat. Or moisturizer–this was Saskatchewan, after all. She smiled and nodded, and turned to collect her clothes.

  To Kal’s disappointment, she did not take her time getting dressed. She pulled on her yoga pants and her shirt, and dished him a queenly wave.

  Kal sighed. “I want to thank you for everything you did for me here.”

  The entertainer cleared the phlegm from her throat. “Say hi to God for me, when you find him.”

  TWELVE

  “Prepare yourself,” as uttered by Abdelahi the cab driver, gurgled and echoed in the bedroom as Kal tried to sleep. Since his return from Kelowna, he had been waiting for an agent of change to appear. It would be a woman, he thought. One of those new tough-lady NHL scouts in a grey skirt and blazer, chewing gum and making fierce eye contact. Or someone from the broadcasting industry looking for an honest and handsome, but not fancy, colour man. But the agent had not come.

  Now Kal suspected she would never come, that he had prepared himself defectively for the coming change in his life. The bedroom window was open and the night was cool. Kal was too lazy, or stunned by anxiety, to get up and close it. As dawn broke, Kal reflected on Abdelahi’s words and realized there was a fair chance he was going crazy. One of his team-mate’s older brothers, a completely normal young man apart from a compulsion to masturbate in public, had apparently turned into a schizophrenic overnight. Now he was on drugs, a drooler, living in some halfway house in New Brunswick.

  Or, or, maybe Kal had a brain tumour. Maybe he was turning homosexual. That certainly would have explained his new and shocking lack of interest in pornography and video games.

  Kal did not wait for his alarm to sound. Shortly after six he showered and prepared himself: he filled a large backpack with clothing and zipped up his jacket. It was cold and bright outside, a typical spring morning in the prairies. The city felt as though it had hardened overnight. A sort of shellac had been brushed over the stout buildings and thirsty old trees. Dogs barked. An airplane ascended for the trip west to Alberta. Kal walked toward the river, past the playground and park benches to Gabriel Dumont Park with its fake Métis village. Long before Kal had arrived in Saskatoon, this had been the site of a dump. Now it was a collection of short trees and shrubs along the twinkling South Saskatchewan, with a canoe launch and play village. Once, before Kal had met Candace, he’d pretended to be Métis in order to impress and have sex with a Blackfoot girl he’d met at a hockey camp in Lethbridge. Unfortunately, his ruse failed. The Blackfoot girl had been saving herself for men of greater means and potential.

  Birds were out in great numbers. Kal was one of the few people on the paths that morning. He passed a homeless man and a couple of veiny joggers and ventured over the shrubbery to the muddy bank of the river. Standing by the gurgling water, he closed his eyes, shut out all his thoughts, and listened. Sparrows. Water. Wind in tall grass. The distant freeway.

  Kal walked back to Broadway, found a cab, and rode to Credit Union Centre with the back windows open. He had hoped Abdelahi might still be working, so together they could explore the true meaning of “Prepare yourself.” But this morning, the cab driver was an obese white fellow who smelled of feta cheese that had been left on the counter too long.

  At the vibrating bus parked in front of the arena, coach Dale Loont stood with his arms crossed. “Where you been?”

  “I took a walk along the river.”

  “You took a walk along the river.”

  “I took a walk along the river.”

  Dale Loont looked up at the blue blue sky. There were plenty of strong chins out there but Dale Loont had a weak one, which had always disturbed Kal in a way he knew was unfair. It was a miserable instinct, to dislike a man according to the strength of his chin. Now he saw the sorrow and wretchedness at the core of Dale Loont.

  “You’re hungover I expect?”

  “No, actually.”

  “You’re supposed to be a model for these kids, Mack.”

  Kal was twenty-four, which made him only five or six years older than the average player. How much wisdom was expected of him, really? “Sorry, Dale.”

  “What are you sorry for, exactly? For being a slob and a boozer? For throwing away your talent? For being a goddamn zombie out there when I need you on fire?”

  Around the lips of Dale Loont, the remnants of toothpaste. Kal looked away. “That’s exactly what I’m sorry for, Dale. All of that.”r />
  “Good. Now, what are you gonna do about it?”

  Kal knew what Dale Loont wanted to hear. Bons mots about passion, sacrifice, one hundred and ten percent. Instead, he gripped Dale Loont’s fleshy arm and pulled him away from the rattling bus. The weak chin was getting to him. Kal was careful not to raise his voice or squint as he spoke. “You don’t have to tell me what’s not important, Dale, because I’m an expert in that field. So let’s just get on the bus and avoid each other for the next, I don’t know,” Kal looked down at his watch, “three hours. Okay?”

  On the bus, Kal sat next to Gordon Yang. “Where’d you go last night?” said Gordon, whose eyes were dark and puffy. “I waited for you at Showgirls and then I waited for you next door. For a while I was hoping you scored with Rupi.”

  “Who’s Rupi?”

  “The Arabian Nights? The fucking lap dance I spent twenty bucks on, thanks for saying thanks?”

  “Sorry, Gord, thanks.”

  “But then I saw her later, in the bar, and you know what she said?”

  “What?”

  “That you’re clinically depressed.”

  The driver plopped into his bouncy seat. “Winnipeg or bust.”

  As the Yellowhead flattened into the sunny east, Gordon Yang fell asleep. It felt wrong to Kal, this direction. A few kilometres out of Saskatoon, he shook Gordon.

  “What? What? Please, Kal, I am so, so tired.”

  “Remember your uncle, who owns that place in Banff?”

  “I remember my uncle, Kal. What do you want?”

  “You think he’d give me a job?”

  “You got a job.” Gordon sighed and sat up. “You wanna be a dishwasher now or something?”

  “Yes. I want to be a dishwasher.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Gord.” Kal shook his friend’s head, and then manoeuvred his face so they looked into each other’s eyes. “When we stop for gas in Viscount, I’m getting off this bus.”

  “What if we stop in Yorkton? We sometimes stop in Yorkton.”

  “Forget Yorkton. Just promise me something. When you get to Winnipeg, I want you to call your uncle and tell him I’m coming. Tell him I’m a good worker.”

  “All you’ve ever done is play hockey.”

  “Tell him I’m a very good worker.”

  “This is stupid.”

  “Phone your uncle.”

  Gordon closed his eyes. “Fine. I’ll phone my uncle and say the finest dishwasher in Saskatchewan is on his way west.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “Idiot.”

  Gordon drifted back to sleep and a familiar quiet settled over the bus, broken only by Dale Loont’s cellphone conversation with his wife. Kal wondered why Rupi the stripper had diagnosed him with clinical depression. Was it the atmosphere of failure in Showgirls seeping into him? The question of God? Kal couldn’t recall why he had asked a stripper about God or what he had expected to learn from her. A number of people would have been better suited to exploring the notion with him. Priests, for instance.

  Before his father died of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, when he was in grade three at St. Thomas Aquinas in Thunder Bay and his family was most like a family, Kal attended Sunday school. He had one outfit: a pair of black pants, a beige dress shirt, and a black vest. Each week Kal would wear one of his dad’s clip-on ties and stand before the sliding glass mirrors in his parents’ bedroom, amidst the musty sleeping smells of his mother and father, and he would be so handsome. Every Sunday, so handsome. His father would declare, from time to time, that Kal would grow up to be a lady-killer.

  At Kal’s father’s funeral, the preacher declared that God had taken him. Sunday school was all about the majesty of God and Jesus, who seemed to be the same thing, yet when God and Jesus took someone–his father, for instance–it was terrible news. When Kal’s mother wasn’t around, his father had called the preacher a Big Gay and mocked the Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Reyes, for her backfat. None of it made sense then, and almost twenty years later, on an eastbound bus, it still didn’t make sense.

  In Yorkton, Dale Loont and some of the players went inside to use the toilet and buy coffee. Kal took his backpack and left Gordon sleeping. The bus driver, Stu, stood at the pump. “I hate Yorkton,” he said. “You have to stand here and hold the nozzle. It doesn’t have that thing on it.”

  “Stu, where’s the bus station?”

  “Downtown on First Avenue. Why?”

  “I’m changing my life, Stu.”

  The bus driver looked up. “There were a couple times I figured on changing my life but I never did ’er.”

  “I lost the magic.”

  “You think so?”

  Kal nodded.

  “You’re finished? Really?”

  “Really.”

  Stu reached up and placed his non-pumping left hand on Kal’s shoulder. “That’s a damn good thing to learn now, before you get old and mean. What should I tell Loont?”

  “Tell him I went off to find my fortune.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know. First, I’m gonna be a dishwasher.”

  Stu stopped pumping and offered his old, lumpy hand for a shake. Kal took it. “Kid, good luck. I hope you find that fortune.”

  “I probably won’t.”

  “No one ever does.” Stu shook his head. “Except sons of bitches. And, unfortunately, you ain’t one of those.”

  THIRTEEN

  When Tanya Gervais researched and bought the urban assault vehicle, she knew it wouldn’t be popular with all of her friends and acquaintances. But Tanya also knew the most unique and maligned automobile on the road today had a lot in common with the woman who sat behind the wheel. Durable and a bit intimidating on the outside, refined and complex inside, and utterly dominant in its sphere.

  The Hummer H2 was still relatively new, with less than a thousand kilometres on the odometer. The cabin was still shiny with the unmistakable fragrance of leather and freshly moulded plastic. Ownership had a retroactive effect. She now could not imagine herself driving anything but a bright-yellow Hummer. When Tanya put it in gear, the sound of her black coat squeaking against the leather seat verged on erotic.

  At dinner parties, after a few glasses of wine, when the West Coast crunchies felt empowered to blame her consumer preferences for the war in Iraq, farmed salmon, Hollywood movies adapted from comic books, climate change, deforestation and desertification in Africa, that funny taste in the tap water, religious fundamentalism, and Vancouver house prices, she answered the way her Hummer might answer, if only it had the capacity to speak.

  You don’t like it, move to Cuba.

  A lot had changed recently. Though it had taken almost twenty years in the business, the most miserable of them in dread Toronto, Tanya was finally being recognized for her talent, experience, vision, and commitment. A month after her thirty-eighth birthday, she had become vice-president, marketing and development, for Canada’s newest and hottest entertainment and lifestyle brand, Leap.

  Leap Television, Leap Satellite, Leap Mobile, Leap Fashion, Leaptv.com. There were even plans for a youth-oriented discount airline if one of the current players in the North American market showed signs of an impending bankruptcy. Her cellphone–a Leap product–linked to a new-generation intercom on the Hummer’s dash. The ring was her current theme song, “The Woman In Me” by Shania Twain. Tanya was not a fan of her music, or that of any other country-crossover artist, but Shania Twain had fashioned herself into an international brand, with extensions into a number of cultural sub-industries. “The Woman In Me,” every time Tanya heard it, was a reminder that limitations were for the feeble. Crunchies who disparaged Tanya’s Hummer were also inclined to dismiss Shania Twain and her chanteuse doppelgänger in Las Vegas, Céline Dion. But the crunchies, drunk on inferior wine, were jealous and pathetic. Were they beautiful Canadian multimillionaires living in warm climates? Were any of them on the Forbes list of Top 20 Richest Female Entertaine
rs?

  “The Woman In Me” began to play, and Tanya whispered an affirmation to herself as she pressed talk on her cell-phone. She was stopped at a set of lights in the transition zone from East to West Hastings Street downtown, a buffer between one of the richest and one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country. Rain joined the strong wind that jolted the Hummer. On the sidewalks, the hipsters and the homeless, the sane and the prophetic, battled their umbrellas.

  “Gervais.”

  “Tanya, my sweet.”

  It was her boss, the thirty-six-year-old genius Darryl Lantz. The man who’d shown her it was folly to pretend she didn’t find inspiration in Shania Twain and luxury SUVs inspired by military transports.

  “Darryl, my liege.”

  “I’m in the Vancouver office here with a couple of the lawyers. Where are you?”

  “East Hastings, in the rain.”

  “The welfare cheques came out today. I hope you brought nunchucks.”

  “Hi, lawyers,” Tanya said.

  They greeted her, through the intercom, formally. It was her thing, to disarm men in expensive suits with a tone of easy confidence. She allowed phrases like “Hi, lawyers” to carry certain messages, like poison on the tips of arrows. Yes, I am a woman. Yes, I dye my hair blond. Yes, I’ve had a teensy bit of pre-emptive work done on the eyes and around the mouth. But if you toy with me I will devote all of my vigour to your undoing.

  “Tanya, we’re working on the British co-pro and we’re stuck on a couple of the details here. You have a minute?”

  She had to drop off a package of raw digital video footage several blocks away, at the Pacific National Exhibition, and traffic was tight. Her lane was clogged with a garbage truck and a bus turning left, so she flipped on the signal light and began creeping into the right lane. The car behind her, a little Jetta, did not approve. Haink, the Jetta said. So Tanya flattened her hand on the Hummer horn, a real horn. A go fuck yourself horn. “Always for you, Darryl.” The rain came down even harder, in waves, so Tanya adjusted the wipers as she half listened to Darryl Lantz and prepared for the light to change. Her plan was to accelerate through the intersection, return to the left lane for the open road, and come back into the right lane in time to miss the pothole repair crew up ahead. The air smelled like tar, one of Tanya’s least favourite smells.