by Lee Gowan
Two months later, Gwen had a miscarriage. In trying to comfort her, Sam made the mistake of suggesting the child was obviously not meant to be born. Gwen closed her eyes and told him to please be quiet. Sometimes, no matter how hard he tried, it was impossible to say the right thing.
Even if they’d wanted to reconsider, there was no turning back from the marriage by then. Their families had been notified and the arrangements had begun. Gwen’s mother had reserved the Legion Hall for the reception and dance. There were over a hundred invitations, and more than 350 people showed up. Vern was Sam’s best man. A rumour went around that he’d outstripped his duties by servicing Gwen’s maid of honour, Louise Dumais, who was not entirely happy in her marriage. Vern insisted it was all nonsense: Louise had simply been feeling a little light-headed from all those rum and Cokes, and her husband had passed out on the head table so that he was not able to attend to her. Vern had taken her out for a moonlight stroll to clear her head.
When Sam finished his degree, Gwen wanted to go home to show her family and everyone in town what an important man Sam had become. Or maybe it was he who’d wanted that. This was one of their ongoing debates. In any case, Sam had no trouble finding a job in Broken Head.
Gwen had grown up in Meridian, a town fifty miles north of the Montana border where people thought of moving to Broken Head as moving to the big city. Her father’s farm implements dealership had made their name prominent in the area. They were The Lowerys. “No wonder old man Lowery’s always driving a new Cadillac, what with the price of that new John Deere.”
To Meridian, the fall of Lowery John Deere might as well have been the fall of Microsoft. But Sam couldn’t explain that to the boys back east, who could read a bottom line as well as anyone. The demographics just didn’t work anymore. There was no money in that area anymore. And it was just as impossible explaining the laws of collateral and diminishing returns to people who were begging you for one more year to turn around their personal disaster—that mythical “next year” when it would rain every two weeks like God was turning on a tap, and the price of grain would go up a couple of bucks a bushel. Someone else had done the dirty work, of course, but Gwen’s father would never forgive Sam.
Gwen needed to come with Sam to the airport in Saskatoon so that she’d have his car while he was in Toronto, so the next morning, after they put Michael on the school bus, they left Ben with Sam’s mother.
“Oh, it’s no problem at all.” His mother clapped her hands together. “We’ll have a great time, won’t we, Ben?”
Ben clung to Gwen, insisting that she was not going anywhere.
“You don’t want to drive all that way, honey. You’ll be much happier with Grandma.”
“I will not! I will not! I hate her!”
“Now, Ben, you don’t mean that. You love Grandma.”
“I hate her. I hate everybody but you, Mommy.”
Sam’s father and Vern were at the kitchen table, silently nursing cups of coffee.
“You’re up early,” Sam said to Vern.
“And the early worm gets eaten,” Vern said, rubbing a temple and faintly smiling.
“Probably hasn’t been to bed yet. Smells like a brewery,” their father said. “Are you plannin’ on startin’ the summer fallow up top?”
“Maybe this afternoon. Thought I’d go get Gwen’s car this morning.”
“No need,” Sam said. “I called my garage to go and get it.”
“Your garage? You own one of those now too?”
Sam didn’t respond.
“No point throwin’ money away. I’ll get it.”
“The garage’ll get it,” Sam said. “I think Dad wants you to start on the summer fallow.”
Vern shook his head. “If I had half the money he throws away …”
“You’d waste it on whiskey and cigarettes and girls with tattoos on their …” Their father’s voice drifted off, leaving the object of the pronoun to their imagination.
Vern grinned. “That’s not waste. That’s research and development.”
Gwen and Sam’s mother finally managed to distract Ben with a colouring book and crayons, and Sam and Gwen made their escape.
“Why don’t you come with me?”
The question broke a silence that had lasted for forty miles.
“Because I hate Toronto.”
She said this to the wheat field out her side window. They had non-verbally negotiated a cease-fire, but he could still see the muzzles of her guns protruding from a trench that had been so long dug and well furnished it had become as comfortable to Gwen as a summer home. His ditch, he had to admit, was probably just as deep even if it was more tastefully appointed. Perhaps if he invited the enemy over for a drink, she would be surprised how much she liked the way things looked from the other side.
“You’d have a great time. I could get tickets to The Lion King.”
The strategy was almost as old as their marriage. The strategy was their marriage.
“What about the boys?”
“They can stay with Mom and Dad.”
“With no warning? That wouldn’t be very fair to your parents, would it?” She actually turned and looked at him. “My, but you’re impulsive all of a sudden, aren’t you? Feeling guilty?”
They did not speak the rest of the way to the airport. He fell asleep on the flight, not having slept well the night before.
When Sam flew east for these meetings at Head Office, the other guys always called him Cowboy. “How’re things back at the ranch, Cowboy,” they’d say, clapping him on the back and urging him into his seat at the boardroom table. The endearment made him very uncomfortable. The condescension was inescapable. At times, in certain mouths, he believed the word carried the same sting as “Camel Jockey,” or “Nigger,” or “Scalp-Hunter.” For instance, when one VP, Gregory Kaplan, said the word, there was something in the tone that suggested he believed Sam spent his weekends wearing white sheets, burning crosses on lawns and chanting orations about conspiracies of Jewish bankers.
Still, Sam didn’t bother (or, in the case of his superiors, didn’t dare) to tell them how much the word insulted him. Once, over martinis, he tried to explain to Gregory Kaplan that, despite what he thought, Sam had not grown up in an atmosphere of anti-Semitism. In fact, his father used to tell them that Jews were the Chosen People, and that they were only hated so much because they had a tendency to be better than everyone else at everything they did. Like Americans, the Jews were the tall poppies of the world. Gregory Kaplan received this information with a blank expression that gradually made Sam run out of steam. After a moment’s silence, Kaplan smiled, nodded, lifted his drink as though to toast the great mysteries and said, “Well, isn’t that interesting. Cowboys ruminating about anti-Semitism. Who would have thought?” And then he changed the subject to the new quarterly offering of IXP.
It truly mystified Sam, this labelling of him as a cowboy. In any bar back home in Broken Head there were dozens of young men strutting about with pointy-toed boots, tight jeans and pearl-buttoned shirts with satin yokes. Most of them were no more cowboys than Sam, but they at least had romantic inclinations in that direction. Vern sometimes wore the costume when he went to town for parts—though he preferred plain white cotton undershirts to any finer weave—but when Sam drove his BMW out of his manicured yard each morning he was always wearing a suit of impeccable quality.
Not that the cut of Sam’s jacket meant anything to his father. Or his brother. Or his wife.
In a drugstore on Queen Street, Sam stood at the condom rack, eyeing the different choices, and decided on the twelve pack over the three. That way they’d think he was just another happily married businessman buying them to take home and put in his bedside table drawer.
They?
The clerk. The clerk would never suspect a thing. Sam had only come in here for a small bottle of Tylenol, and he’d seen the condoms and decided he needed them. That’s what he told himself, though he could easily have b
ought Tylenol in the lobby of the hotel. Condoms too. But who knew when somebody from the conference might wander into that little shop?
He had no definite plan in mind for using a condom. Well, there was that branch manager from the Maritimes, but he really didn’t think she was interested in anything but a little harmless flirting. On the other hand, she might be. What did Gwen expect from him? He had a right to want sex. There was nothing abnormal about a man needing sex every once in a while. The last time he’d had sex was on his birthday, ten months ago. He’d attempted to roll Gwen on top of him, the way he used to (he liked the bottom best), but she held him tightly in the missionary position until he was finished.
He grabbed the package and marched to the front of the store, studying the clerk as he approached her. A young woman with a silver stud through one nostril. That must have hurt. He hoped the boys would never be tempted to such foolishness.
As he neared the counter, a dissolute man lurched in front of him. The man wore a torn and filthy fireman’s jacket, the kind that had been fashionable among young urbanites a few years ago but had long since been discarded. The smell of him made Sam take a step back.
“Can I help you?” the clerk asked, eyeing the man doubtfully.
“Do you mind if I call you Marie?” the man asked.
The clerk studied the man, her withdrawn expression quickly changing to full fledged revulsion. On her left breast she wore a name tag that said BRIANNA.
“Yes, I do mind.”
She looked at Sam as she spoke, and he smiled his sympathy for her plight.
“I can’t call you Marie?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because Marie’s not my name.”
“No?” He swayed, but was obviously lucid enough to read the tag on her breast. “Your name is Brianna. See, I know your name. I’ll call you Brianna.”
“Very impressive. Can I help you?”
“Yes, Brianna. Can I get some razor blades?”
Brianna considered this request. Perhaps she, like Sam, had been expecting the man to ask for cigarettes. Still, there was no doubt that the man could use some razor blades. One had to remember, though, they were kept behind the counter for good reason. But Brianna was not a psychologist, and even if she were the man’s suicidal tendencies were likely passive. He had his next drink to live for. One might argue that his willingness to waste the money on razor blades—money he might have spent on that drink—was a dangerous sign, but he might mean to use the blades to shave his face and reclaim himself for the work force or for a visit to his family or his church. Or even to the bar. Razor blades were ambiguous. If the man wanted razor blades, she would give him razor blades.
She swept the package over the register’s eye, and told him the price. He began to measure out coins from a cache he had been clutching in his fist. His motor skills were not what they should have been, making it a laborious process, but at last he placed the last penny on the counter and she swept the coins into her palm and dropped them into the proper slots in the register. Then she dropped the blades and the receipt into a plastic bag and handed it to the man. Sam clutched the condoms and Tylenol in his folded palms.
“I don’t need a bag,” the man said, but she ignored him.
“Can I help you?” she asked Sam, smiling widely.
Sam plunked the Tylenol and the condoms down on the counter, and she rang them through. When he opened his wallet, he found, to his surprise, that he was out of cash. Oh, yes. He had paid for that round of martinis. He took out his ABM card, and she swept it through her machine. Sam could not get to the terminal to punch in his personal identification number because the man was still standing in the way, trying to fish the razor blades out of the plastic bag. As he held the bag with his left hand, his right hand kept missing the opening. The clerk looked at Sam and smiled apologetically. Finally, when the man missed again, Sam reached into the bag and pulled out the razor blades.
“Hey! Those are my razor blades! This asshole’s trying to steal my razor blades!”
Sam took a step back, worried that the man might take a swing at him. “Here. I’m only trying to help you.”
He held the razor blades out to the man, who briefly considered the offering.
“I’m not a baby. I don’t need your help. Asshole! Put them back in my bag.”
Sam sighed, met the clerk’s sympathetic eyes and dropped the razor blades into the bag.
“Asshole! I can do it myself. I’m not a baby!”
“Yes, well, you’re standing in the way of the ABM terminal, and I can’t pay for my purchase.”
“I’m not in the way! I’m not stopping you from paying for your stupid French ticklers. Use it if you like, Asshole!”
Sam stepped dangerously close to the man and, holding his breath, punched the date of Michael’s birth into the terminal.
“You think any lady’s gonna let you use one of those things on her, Asshole? Not likely. Ask Marie here. You wouldn’t fuck this asshole, would you? Or are you one of those queer fellows? Is that what you are? That’s what you are, isn’t it? Isn’t it?!”
Sam nodded politely at the clerk and marched out of the store. He’d gone half a block before he realized he’d forgotten his purchase. He did not go back. What did he need with condoms anyway? He bought Tylenol in the lobby of the hotel. It was time to head back for the afternoon session.
Sam was in the city for three days of corporate pep talks entitled “Unleashing the Hunter Within: Attaining Your Marketing Goals.” What that meant was that he was here to strategize about how to deal with the latest branch closings in his area. Customers tended to be touchy about branch closings no matter what the justification, and at the moment the bank was making record profits, so the left-leaning media were attempting, fairly successfully, to whip the people in the affected rural communities into a bit of a lather. Head Office wasn’t overly concerned about feedback—there was little money or political clout in those rural areas—but they did feel a slight responsibility to offer Sam, who was on the front lines, some strategies for dealing with the hate and derision.
During the smoke break he stood at the wall of glass, staring across the street at the TD Centre, an exquisite grid of black rectangles within larger black rectangles. Black, like one of those inverse stars, black holes, that lurk at the corners of the universe. In the evening the structure glowed like polished obsidian. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look out at such perfection every day at work, instead of at the boarded-up video store across the parking lot in Broken Head. For five years Sam had begged and bargained with Gwen, even demanded that they should pack up their things and move to Toronto, where they could get on with their lives. He’d promised her riches she couldn’t imagine; unfortunately, Gwen had enough money already, thank you very much, and had no wish to run away to some big city where people would make her feel stupid like most of Sam’s friends from the city did. Like Sam did. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to the boys. They had friends. They had lives. They had this green postage stamp at the corner of his father’s ranch. It wasn’t all about Sam and his career.
And so Sam stayed on, though he felt he was walking a road that led nowhere. He’d made as much as he could of his job. Not to say that his position was as unimportant as most people thought. His branch serviced the entire southwest corner of the province, and because Sam was more forward-thinking than his colleagues in Regina and Saskatoon or the other regions, he had soon become the point man for the entire province. If Head Office needed information on the region, they’d fly Sam to Toronto. To the bank, Sam was Saskatchewan. They couldn’t have imagined how completely disconnected he felt from it.
Not the place. He loved the landscape. It was the most perfect landscape in existence: an sublimely essential combination of grass and hill and sky and cloud. But the boys here at Head Office could not imagine how alienated he felt from the community he served. After all, he had been raised there. They were his people. But he ha
d no friends. He had no one to share his love of Puccini. His monthly business trips to Toronto were the joy of Sam’s life. So it bothered him a great deal that he was forced to play country bumpkin to boorish VPs and investment analysts who’d never even heard of Mies van der Rohe, but who insisted on greeting Sam with a slap on the back and a “Hey, Cowboy. How do you manage to keep those shoes so clean?”
Was it the name? For a time, in university, he’d tried calling himself Samuel McMahon, but not one person had paid him the respect of adding the three letters when they addressed him, and he took so much ribbing from Gwen for the attempt that he finally gave up. Anyway, Samuel sounded as much like he was born to ride a horse as Sam.
Perhaps his colleagues’ endearment was simply a reflection of their condescension towards anything beyond the 401—a condescension he longed to share but couldn’t, fearing that something of his background would reveal itself in him: something of his grandfather’s or his father’s gait in his own stride. After all, his grandfather had made his living as a rancher. His father, on the other hand, had diversified by buying more cultivated land and had given up working his cattle with horses before Sam could even remember, finding that with strategically built fences and corrals the family could manage the herd with a truck and on foot. Chasing them on horses only made the cattle wilder and more difficult, even dangerous, to handle.
He tried to explain this to a woman named Erika over cocktails in a rusty-walled bar on College Street. “Old Sam turned the place over to Dad, and the first thing Dad did was stop using the horses to work the cattle. Made Old Sam furious. He had this beautiful old horse. A black stallion named Nitro …”
“Old Sam?”
“No! The horse was called Nitro.” He was actually shouting, trying to be heard over the music—if you could call it that. “Old Sam was my grandfather. I’m named after him. He died when I was nine.”