Bow Grip (12 page)

I still didn’t really know how to properly tune the thing, and I have no idea how it must have sounded from the other side of the wall, in Hector’s empty room next door, but I had a good time. I learned to cradle the cello with the inside of one leg, giving myself something to lean into as I drew the bow across the strings. I liked how it felt in my body when I managed to get a string to sound, resonant and clear. I could feel it humming in my tailbone, straight up through my back and arms. At eleven o’clock on the nose, I wiped the cello down with the soft rag, carefully laid her inside her case, and stowed her back in the closet.

I knew I should have felt tired after the day I had, but I couldn’t even make myself lay down yet. Every time I stopped moving, my brain started turning so fast it made the stitches in my head itch. I put a sweater and coat on, patted my pockets for my lighter and smokes, and headed out for a little walk.

Hector’s truck was back already, the cab dark behind the fogged-up windshield. I guessed his date hadn’t gone too well.

I found a little footpath on the other side of the ditch alongside the entrance ramp onto the highway, right next to the tree line. It felt good to stretch my legs, and the chill wind stung my nostrils and cooled the burn gathering in the hair follicles surrounding the gash in my scalp.

The path led me alongside the highway for a while, and then through a scruffy field tufted with Safeway bags caught in bare willow branches, broken beer bottles, and an upturned shopping cart missing two wheels. I could smell wood smoke, and underneath that, the tang of car exhaust. The far end of the field sloped down towards the Bow River, and I walked along through the frosted bull rushes and horsetails under an arching steel bridge painted red.

“Buddy, you wouldn’t spare a cigarette, would you?” The voice jolted me out of my thoughts, and I nearly jumped when I first heard it. It belonged to a small man whose face was almost buried in his beard, which was shot through with silvery whiskers stained bronze with nicotine.

This town was hard on a full pack of cigarettes. I opened my pack, pulled back the tin foil from the second half. Shook out two smokes into my other hand.

“Thanks, man.” He stood up from the spot of dry gravel he had been sitting on, way up under the eaves of the bridge. It was quieter under here than I would have thought, the cars wheels clicked and thrummed over our heads, but they sounded much further away than they actually were. He had a small fire burning, and there was a ratty grey wool blanket at his feet. When he reached his hand out to retrieve
the smokes from mine, I could see there had been letters once, a word, tattooed on the backs of the first knuckle of each finger, but the ink had spread and blurred into fat blue stick figures.

“Like a swig of wine?”

I shook my head.

He shrugged, flipping one cigarette up between his teeth and stashing the other in his pocket. “Suit yourself.” He pulled out an ancient silver lighter and lit his cigarette, then leaned over to block the wind and light mine.

“Cold night,” I said.

“Cold, but dry. You can stay warm if you can stay dry.” I nodded, since this was true.

“You looking for a little action then?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Looking to hook up? There was a fella came through earlier, I see him around down here couple nights a week, wears a red down jacket.”

“I’m not sure what you mean. I’m not looking for drugs, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The guy laughed, which set off a volley of deep coughs, all the way up from his chest. “Buddy, you’re in the wrong part of town if drugs are what you’re after.”

“I’m just out for a walk.”

“Sure, out for a walk. Whatever you want to call it. I don’t care. I was just making conversation, my friend, I don’t care what you do with your spare time. Each to their own, is what I say.”

He shrugged and returned to his little campfire, arranging the blanket around himself before he sat down again.

I turned and headed back the way I came. It wasn’t until I was halfway back across the field, the neon sign in the
Capri’s parking lot glowing on my horizon, that it dawned on me what the old guy was talking about.

I thought about guys, strangers, meeting each other under some bridge, out in the cold and the open, and I tried to line it up in my head with Ally and Kathleen, their artist’s loft and their stainless steel appliances.

Maybe it was that men were just men, no matter what side of the slice of bread they buttered, and that things were different all around for women when it came right down to the sex thing, gay or not.

Not like I would really know, though, since the only lesbian I knew very well was my ex-wife. There was that postie from Regina that we had for a while at the shop, but it’s not like we ever asked her about it or even knew for sure, it was mostly speculation on Franco’s part. Said it was about her footwear, and that you could usually tell if you knew what you were looking for, but then Franco says a lot of things.

I told Franco once that I only listened to him about half the time he was yammering on because only twenty percent of what he said was anywhere close to the truth. He thought a bit before answering me, his eyes twinkling, and said that even if only twenty percent of what he said was indeed true, and he maintained his percentage was a lot higher than that, but even at my estimated twenty percent, he was still right more than I was, because I hardly ever fucking said anything at all.

It was a little past midnight by the time I got back to the motel, and the temperature had dropped below zero, I could tell because the parking lot was shiny with frozen dew. I sat down on the little turquoise bench and lit my last smoke of the night. I felt like I could sleep now, after the fresh air.

The cold air made the smoke from my cigarette taste more bitter than usual in the back of my throat, making me feel like puking. As I leaned over and stubbed my smoke out on the frosty cement, the door to Hector’s room opened just a few inches.

I saw a cowboy boot first, then a long-bodied guy wearing jeans and a baseball cap slid out, closing the door behind him. He turned quickly, not seeing me sitting right behind him on the bench, and we almost ran into each other right in front of my door. He sucked in a breath and stood back, like I’d scared him.

“Sorry, dude, didn’t see you.” He quickly nodded, then hustled across the parking lot. A cab pulled up just as he got to the little bedding area full of bark mulch and bare shrubs next to the road. He leaped over the mulch, then the ditch, and opened the cab door. The interior light lit up his face for a minute, clean-shaven, with a thumb-push of a dimple in his chin. He slammed the door shut, then the cab’s tail lights disappeared into the dark of the highway on-ramp.

I went inside my room, threw my coat and sweater over the back of the chair, folded my pants and shirt over the arm, and crawled under the covers. I don’t remember if I had time to think one single thought before sleep took over.

The next morning the ache in my head was gone, and the only thing my stitches did was itch. My hair felt unwashed already, so to make up for it I had another really hot bath, and shaved meticulously while I soaked. I didn’t get out until the skin on the bottoms of my toes began to pucker.

I sat for a while in the chair in my underwear, the phone
on my lap, the pink note from the emergency room doctor in my hand.

Panic attacks. A phone number for a shrink. A motel room to keep my cello in. I didn’t recognize my own life. How could this be a day in the life of me?

I called my mom promptly on the stroke of ten, because it was a Friday, and I knew she’d be downtown at Cutters Hair Salon, in the chair closest to the window, getting her hair done by Louise Strickland. Louise didn’t have a female customer under the age of sixty, or a male one over the age of ten. She was a grandma and grandson specialist. She did flattops and brush cuts and permanents and sets, that was her established and firm repertoire. Louise was what my mom and the bingo set called a spinster, never had any children of her own. It was rumoured that she bore a lifelong disdain for little girls, having been the oldest of five sisters, and the only one to have never wed. My mom and pretty much all the old guard Drumheller gals had always got their hair done by Louise, for the last twenty years or so, anyways, after Louise’s dad passed and she found out there was three mortgages on the house they lived in together, all her sisters having married and moved out, and Louise had to go to Edmonton to hairdressing school to keep the roof over her head, and not lose the house her family had lived in since they first found coal in Alberta.

“You have reached the home of Ruth Cooper. Please do leave me a message and I will return your call as soon as possible. Have a lovely day.”

“Hi, Mom. Just calling to let you know I feel fine today, my head is fine, but I’m still going to the doctor, just to get everything checked out. Say hi to Buck Buck for me.” I replaced the receiver back on its cradle, balancing it on
my knees. My mom still had an old answering machine, no voice mail. I could see Buck Buck circling and whining in the house, confused because he could hear my voice echoing in the empty kitchen.

I took a huge breath, picked up the phone again, and called the doctor.

“Dr Witherspoon’s office.” The voice was male, which for some reason I hadn’t been expecting.

“Hello, my name is Joseph Cooper, and I was referred to Dr Witherspoon by another doctor at Rockyview General. I’d like to make an appointment to see the doctor today or tomorrow, if that’s possible.”

“Sir, most of Dr Witherspoon’s patients wait for up to a month before seeing her. I can’t possibly get you in today or tomorrow.” He sounded like I should already know all this. “I can take your name and call you back to let you know how long of a wait you can expect.” The guy’s tone of voice made me feel like I was being scolded. I didn’t like him already.

“Listen, I’m from Drumheller, I’m only in town for a few days. Yesterday I had what the doctor thought was a panic attack. I passed out and cracked my head open. There are no doctors in Drumheller that can handle this type of thing.”

I actually had no idea if there were any shrinks in Drumheller, since I never needed one before. But I knew one thing for sure: even if there was someone in town trained for shit like this, I certainly wasn’t going to spill my guts to them. All I needed was for Mitch Sawyer or any of those fucking guys to hear about it. This whole deal was best filed away in the same place as my low sperm count, in a cupboard marked my own fucking business.

“Let me speak to the doctor at lunch. Perhaps we can squeeze you in right after her last client. Can you call back around one-thirty?”

“Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

I hung up and spent several minutes just sitting there, still in my underwear, staring at my open suitcase on the other bed. What did a guy wear to go see a shrink, anyway? I didn’t know anyone who’d ever gone to one. The closest thing I could think of was when Sarah and Jean-Paul went to see a marriage counsellor a few years back, right after Sarah found out about Jean-Paul and the woman who owned the jewellery store, the same place they had bought their wedding rings from eight years ago. Sarah was a mess for a couple of months, all puffy-eyed and volatile, but finally decided not to leave him. They both quit going to the marriage counsellor, and I never asked her why, much less what she had worn when she went.

I finally settled on my default attire: GWG jeans, a white undershirt, and a blue work shirt. The same thing I had worn for the vast majority of my life. I figured dressing up for a shrink might work against me. She might think I’m someone that I’m usually not, and that might take her longer to figure out how to cure me, which would only end up costing me more money.

Panic attacks. I shook my head at myself, trying not to wonder if my dad was somewhere, watching me stumbling through my life, and shaking his head right back at me.

My dad hardly ever came down with a cold, or even a cavity, until that day in the boat. It was flawless, the way he went. Not that it was the way any of us left behind wanted it, but my father died perfectly, keeping in character with the way he had lived. No fuss, no muss. No trouble to anyone,
at least not for long. Just the way he probably wanted it. That’s what everyone said, anyway, no suffering, it happened so quick, downright efficient even, just like him. I listened and nodded, and never told anyone the truth about the things he had said to me in between breaths that day in his truck. Regrets, mostly, things he wished he would have gotten around to. Where he kept the key to his secret safety deposit box, the one that he had kept all on his own since before he even married my mom. How he had broke down and cried after the second attack, and confessed to me to never tell my mother, but that he had never really believed in a god, undiluted fear making his voice quiver when it passed over his too-white lips. How he always loved me just a little bit more than he ever could Sarah, how he always felt bad about it, and never spoke of it to my mother, but how she always knew anyway.

The hours following my father’s death were blurry and out of order in my head, even when they were happening. Allyson had showed up minutes after my mother, who was so inconsolable that one doctor had pulled me aside and suggested that we give her a shot of something to calm her down. Allyson sprang into fierce and focused action. She had planted both of her feet on the weary tiles of the cardiac ward hallway and refused to do any such thing. She had brought a fleece blanket with her from the trunk of her car, which she wrapped around my mother’s heaving shoulders, and together we escorted her out of the hospital and into Ally’s car, leaning together like teepee poles, holding my mom upright.

At home, my mom refused to lay down, shook her head at the mention of anything to eat, and barely sipped the tea Ally made her. We sat in a stunned circle around the
kitchen table. Sarah poured us all a belt of scotch, and Jean-Paul attempted a clumsy toast. My mom’s hands shook visibly when she tried to lift her glass, which she touched to her lips without drinking, then put back down on the table. She had stopped sobbing out loud, but tears streamed out of her eyes unabated, tracing the wrinkles in her cheeks on the way down her face.