Everything Is So Political (8 page)

“Bud, our position is well-covered in the media. Here, this is our official pamphlet for the public. Look around HRM. Everyone is unhappy everywheres with the way this city is run. We're just the only ones with the stones to do somethin' about it. People may not support us now, but the mayor looks worse and worse as this goes on.”

Miles remembers his last encounter with the Theodore Kelley. The surprise. The photo.

“Thank you,” he says and walks away.

March 2

Miles is downstairs at Jacob's lounge on Portland Street. It is early, but a wide variety of people have gathered for the weekly Scoop Outs set. A punk show is not a familiar place for Miles. Nervous, of course, he is put at ease by the humility and friendliness of these people dubbed Darksiders.

One of them introduces himself as Pete. He has spent the past three years teaching in Korea and has only lived in Dartmouth for two weeks, but he is already a regular at Jacob's Lounge. Eventually Miles awkwardly interrupts him.

“Do you know a guy with a beard named Ethan?”

“Uh…yeah.” Pete stumbles through Miles' graceless questions with embarrassment. “He actually lives in the building next door. He's probably here.”

It is midnight now and Miles is sure he watched Ethan walk around the bar and out the back door. He makes his way outside where a crowd is smoking and talking in spurts. Ethan leans against the wall at the edge of the group, but with his ear in the conversation.

Any façade of social confidence fades and Miles blurts “stARTaKISS?”

A few in the crowd look at the nervous young man, including Ethan himself. Grinning coolly, Ethan clarifies, “That's not my name, but it
is
how I identify myself.”

“So the stencilwork. With Theodore Kelley and Ben Gilson. That's you?”

“Yep, that's me,” he says, smiling through his large beard. “I hope they've made you laugh.”

“Well, yeah,” Miles says. “I guess so. Mostly I'm getting tired of all this. I can't say I'm a fan of the mayor, but this union is way out of line. They're holding the city hostage.”

“Yeah. I see your point. But only if we let them.”

“Exactly!” Miles says thickening up. “The time has come to ACT!”

“To act?” Ethan questions. “What do you mean to act?”

Miles shrivels back down to his usual size.

“I don't know, exactly. I would like to think I could do something significant. That we are not at the mercy of a university, a municipality, a union.”

“Buddy, we're not, though,” Ethan assures him. “What's your name?”

“Miles. Name's Miles Gilles.”

“There's lots you can do, we all can do, separate from those, um… hierarchies you mentioned.” These last three words rose in pitch. “Come back here tomorrow night at midnight,” Ethan suggests. “There is plenty we can, um…
do
.”

March 4

When Miles arrives, five or more guys in their twenties or thirties are already there. Though Miles is nervous, they give him the feeling that he is safe with them, that he is welcome, that they will be his friends.

A few minutes after midnight, Ethan appears. He is wearing a coat that, combined with wild hair and beard, gives him the athletic appearance of a sailor. Ethan is carrying a large plastic tub with no lid. The tub is filled with water balloons. The air is cold, but must be above freezing. When each man talks, his breath is hardly visible.

“Miles!” Ethan says warmly. “Wait till you see this. What we're going to DO is have some fun with these goons. Okay?”

“Uh…okay.” Miles does not understand, but the ritual unfurls before him.

Ethan places the plastic tub in the large basket of an adult-sized tricycle. He rides the trike slowly out to Portland Street. The group has expanded to almost twenty young men. They follow him quietly. After pedalling three blocks, the tricycle turns up Victoria Road. Ethan lifts himself off the seat, bearing down on the pedals to stay in motion up the steep hill. Several of the others gather around the basket at the rear, pushing Ethan forward. He grunts and contorts his face, exerting great force upon the tricycle. Two of the others walk alongside Ethan now, each placing a hand on the handlebars to give him support.

The dozen or so who do not push walk silently behind their friends at the tricycle, watching and walking. They are climbing. It takes them about ten minutes to move one block up Victoria Road. At this point, some of the rear guard take hold of the tricycle, relieving their friends of the heavy duty. They proceed this way for four and a half blocks in total. Even Miles took his turn supporting Ethan in his climb. It is 1:30 in the morning by the time they reach Dartmouth High, exhausted.

They unload the tub in the space that once was a wooded path behind Dartmouth Sportsplex. The trees are gone now, and construction has begun on an expanded bus terminal. The water balloons are removed a few at a time by each man. They hide them around the rear of the Sportsplex parking lot.

Miles approaches Ethan: “What time do they get here?”

“We're not sure. First run is at six, so that's what we're assuming. But you know.”

“And when they get here?”

“What do we
do?”

“Yeah.”

“BOMMMMBS AWAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!” Ethan yells into the empty night to the laughter of his friends.

The hours pass with steady conversation, cigarettes, and random outbursts of laughter and song.

Now 3 AM. Now 4 AM. Now 5 AM.

At 5:30 no one is there to start the generators to heat the makeshift shelters. No Strike Captain arrives at 5:45 to assure the pickets are properly posted. At 6 am, no one is there. The group waits quietly, each person where he has hidden his balloons. At 6:15, no one is there. At 6:30, the terminal is empty.

“Ethan?” someone calls, hoping for some guidance, some insight.

“Well, I suppose one benefit of being a union member is you get weekends off. Ahem—BOMMMMMMBS AWAAAAAAAAYYYYY!” Ethan cries.

In the absence of striking bus drivers, the group splits into chaos, hurling water balloons at each other, in every direction.

With the water balloons running out, Ethan begins handing out stencils and cans of spray paint. They checker the empty parking lot with innumerable images of Theodore Kelley
and Ben Gilson: playing basketball, sharing a giant donair, on a bicycle built for two, in a parody of Millet's
Angelus.

Miles is unsure what it all means, but he is sure they are
doing something
. Ethan himself is spraying a giant pair of lips on the side entrance to the Dartmouth Sportsplex. Brick-by-brick, the dripping black lips take shape on the wall.

All over the parking lot, everything is signed: stARTaKISS, stARTaKISS, stARTaKISS!

March 7

Miles is quite ill after a long weekend. He hardly slept, spent too much time in wet socks, and drank too much. The possibility of a Dalhousie Faculty strike seems to have come and gone. Obsessed with the transit strike, he has fallen behind academically. In bed with the delirium of a low-grade fever, he embraces certain fantasies sexual and political. He keeps a pen and notebook in his bed to write poems like this one:

Still breathing.

Giggle goggle google stop tickling me.

Ize getz over my sickiez someday.

Don't kick my fucking cat.

Hey fuck off do you know how sick I am?

Whatever. Go back to bed.

Don't count on the strike btw-

Better be a strike. Paper due. Know nothing about Uganda.

Like the idea of a Rain Chief. Epo iso.

Daniel Denver, epo iso?

Daniel Denver, iso Thug.

Daniel Denver, too fat fer donuts.

Daniel/Theodore/Ben

play their fiddles

all the way to citadel hill.

March 11

Sunday afternoon Miles feels normal again. At about 3 pm an alert lights up his phone, a message from the University:

The Government of Nova Scotia has granted permanent solvency relief to University Pension Plans. This will result in welcome relief from onerous solvency payments, and allowed both negotiating teams to arrive at a new collective agreement. Classes will continue as scheduled on Monday.

Great
, Miles thinks.
Daniel Denver, or whoever it is, can sprinkle pixie dust on the pension issue so that the elite university doesn't lose any students to Toronto, or wherever, but I still have no way of getting anywhere.

At 11pm, after doing hours of shoddy research for a paper that
will
in fact be due in class
tomorrow
, Miles wanders the Internet. He stumbles from one goofy photo to another. He watches grainy videos of Johnny Cash from the seventies. Then he types in “hal” and waits for the history to reveal his most visited website of the last few weeks:
halifaxonstrike.com
. A plain white background with over a half dozen boxes containing news articles relating to whatever union is considering a work-stoppage. Under the banner that tauntingly reads
Only
246
days until the next municipal election. Be careful how you vote…
one box says “METRO TRANSIT- TENTATIVE AGREEMENT ANNOUNCED!”

He is sceptical. He imagines an evil marionette-master behind the site playing ironic children's songs on all the strings that support his life. In reality, he knows, the author is an opportunist who has finally managed a highly visited website that will soon be useless if the strike is over. Miles senses regret in the Caps-locked headline.

Sure enough the link to Metro Transit's website confirms that Ben Gilson will recommend that the ATU agree to the deal in a vote tomorrow afternoon. Council will then ratify on Tuesday evening. Busses and ferries could be back in service as soon as Thursday.

Miles imagines Theodore Kelley and Ben Gilson parting ways at the Holiday Inn. Somehow the mayor's meekness physically debilitates Ben Gilson as they shake hands. The union boss slumps against a wall as the satisfied politician turns to exit. Before stepping into the automatic revolving doorway, Kelley looks over his shoulder and smiles without opening his mouth. Then he winks at Ben Gilson, so subtly that the slouching, younger man thinks he may have imagined it.

March 12

Miles' second alarm sounds at 8 am. Sun shines through the vertical blinds, casting black stripes on the hardwood floor. Dust floats around his window frame in the magnification of the sunlight. He would prefer to imagine that he is not a dust-ridden slob, and that he sees photons, warming him to the idea of a new week.

Miles sits up and places his bare feet on the floor. He feels like a ladybug ready to fly, beleaguered by numerous breezes that amount to nothing but will ruin her day. His eyes are all but closed when he raises the blinds and is swarmed by the irony of sunlight on a cold morning when it is almost spring. A teased, tired ladybug, he decides to open the window. He lets it all go.

Elephant Air

Fran Kimmel

S
arah doesn't call me Dad any more. Now I'm just Ivan. I call her from wherever I can find a phone that works. I cram myself into the booth outside an arena or in some dingy lobby and think about where we've just landed. Then I study the clocks on the yellow pages map and work backwards through the time zones to make sure it's a decent hour. I take off my baseball cap and tuck in my shirt and breathe in and out before I dial her number.
Hi sweetie,
I say if she picks up, which is hit and miss: lately more miss.
Just checking in, seeing how you doing.
I say this every time. Hundreds of phone booths. Years worth of just checking in, seeing how she's doing.
Hello Ivan
, when she discovers it's me. What she really means:
I was hoping for someone…substantial
.

This time she's telling me about some video. “You're on YouTube. Again. It's a forty-seven-second clip. You're hacking away at the back of her legs. I can't tell if it's Sassy or Bliss.”

When she talks like this, I feel like she's holding a blowtorch to the phone, singeing my cheek hairs. “How are you, Sarah?”

“She's got the speckled ears. That's Bliss, right?”

Sometimes, on the good days, she gives me a few crumbs.

“How's school?” I ask. “Must be exam time.”

“You were trying to make her turn on the stupid little bucket.”

I take more slow breaths, in and out, in and out. “We're coming. In August. It's a few months away but I was hoping …” What was it, exactly, I was hoping?

“Ivan the Terrible. That's what they're calling you now. Want the link?”

I've forgotten the words I rehearsed. “Come on, Sarah. I don't know nothing about —”

“YouTube, Ivan. It's called YouTube.”

All's I know, they got it wrong.

“They got it wrong,” I say to her. I would never hurt Bliss. I would never hurt any of my girls.

“It's vi-dee-oo, so they could hardly get it wrong. Someone just turns on the camera and you do what you do. You'll be on there forever. You're very photogenic. You look quite ripped as you're whacking away.”

When Sarah was just a little thing, not more than four or five, I could make her laugh so hard she got hiccups. Sometimes even now, at night mostly, I can still feel the weight of her attached to my hip, her powder-white legs dangling.

Her mother gave her to me for a whole summer once. It was the summer she decided to fix her bulging feet. She had lined up her sister—the mouthy one with big teeth—to watch over Sarah, but then she got double pneumonia and there was nobody else. I was last resort—the bottom of the barrel.
Ivan, you got to swear to me you won't do any of your macho-shit around our daughter. Don't let her near the damn elephants.
I kept my end of the bargain, sticking Sarah to me like a fly on flypaper. Except when the chains came off during training rounds. Then I had no choice but to whisk her behind the rope. I never took my eyes off her. Only that one time. Only that one time when the babies butted heads and all hell broke loose and we had to whip them apart and everyone screamed bloody murder and when we finally got them separated, I jumped back behind the rope to where she was supposed to be perched on the hay bundle, colouring her butterflies page, only she wasn't. All I could find were a few scattered crayons and one half-coloured wing.

The telephone sounds buzzy. “Sarah?”

I hear her sigh. Then nothing. Then, “You called me.”

“I was hoping… I was hoping we could get together. When I'm in Canada. I know it's a ways off—August 16—but I got an extra day at the end and thought maybe I could treat you to a steak dinner, someplace fancy.”

“I'm a vegan, Ivan.”

This was new. Or it wasn't. Maybe she'd been a vegan whatever-the-hell since before her first bra. I could tell you about Ronnie and her watermelon rinds, how Bliss likes her oatbran with cinnamon on top. My own kid. I couldn't even say what she looks like anymore.

“I guess a hot dog is out of the question.” I wait, the phone clamped to my slippery fist. “Well, carrot sticks then. Whatever you like.” I say this stuff slowly to make it last longer. “It would be nice to catch up.”

“The circus comes to town,” she says. “Imagine.”

“Yeah,” I say, not sure.

“I already heard, Ivan. I circled the date on my calendar already.”

“Really,” I say.

“I'll be there. Wouldn't miss it.”

I'll be there, she'd just said. Wouldn't miss it. Her words knock the breath from me. I imagine sitting across from my daughter at a table with a real cloth on top. I'll look into her eyes, sea green like her mother's. We'll have hours and hours, and I will listen so very carefully to everything she'll tell me, to everything she'll leave out.

I get so caught up in the notion of it, I forget to pay attention. I never even hear the lilt in her voice.

If Ronnie had been that careless, I would have clipped her under the chin.

* * *

It used to be that we'd unload in a new city and the crowds lined up in droves. Everyone wanted to see the elephants with painted toenails and top hats marching down their street. The girls loved the praise, flapping their ears as they clomped along, tail to trunk, trunk to tail. People hollered and cheered, a mile-long standing ovation, and we'd wave and tip our caps and blow kisses to the pretty girls and strut along like we were kings of the jungle. Nobody cared about the size of our sticks or whether they had pointy hooks or whether we shouted when we gave commands. Back then, people respected what we stood for. People remembered that elephants could stomp you flat as a soda can and that it was the men like us who kept everybody out of trouble.

I can't remember when it changed. What city? What season? Now when we do the elephant walk we gotta look straight ahead, keep our mouths shut, avoid eye contact. The extra hands keep pace between us and the sidewalks, carrying a long line of rope, thick as rolled up newspaper. That rope is dental floss to an elephant, but it's a barrier for the nutcases. I feel bad for the parents who show up. Those with little ones especially. A mother stuffs the pamphlet in her purse, but by then it's too late, she's seen the glossy photos. She looks up, dazed first, then disgusted. And then we move on and it's another mother, and another after that.

But this was Canada, a civilized country. Sarah's city. As soon as we pulled in last night, I called five restaurants, asking about their vegan food and if they got flowers or candles or something nice. When she didn't answer her phone I thought maybe she would surprise me at the barn.

We hoofed through her back streets, the girls in top form, frisky almost, my body humming hope drivel. Hoping Sarah hadn't paid for a ticket so I could treat her to the show. Hoping she could still eat cotton candy now she was a vegan. Hoping I could find an iron for my new shirt.

The morning was warm. A pleasant kind of muggy. We sweated along, eyes straight ahead. There was some kind of ruckus up round the next corner, two police cars, a bulge of spectators facing away from us, jeers and gasps, and a low-pitched chant with words I couldn't make out. Ronnie hesitated. She doesn't like corners, the not knowing what's next, and I had to prod her shoulder to keep her moving. “Come on now, Ronnie!” I shouted, so she'd know I meant business.

As we started the turn, I got my first glimpse. Halfway up the block there was a small metal cage, dog-kennel size, mounted high in the back of a pick-up parked along the street. Inside, a woman. Young. More a girl really. She was crammed behind the bars, hugging her knees. Naked it looked, painted bright orange, with tiger stripes.

The chant was louder now. The usual hooks and chains stuff. The group surrounding the caged girl turned to us like a wave. Most looked like anaemic kids, pale and skinny. They held signs on posts too heavy for them, with blown up pictures of a dead caged tiger, an elephant getting hit with a pitchfork.

A man holding a crying kid yelled to the sign people, “Get a job why don't you.”

I hoped like hell Sarah wasn't anywhere in that crowd; I wanted her to see the magic, not this part. I grabbed Ronnie's ear with my fingers for support. She was happy enough now that she'd conquered her corner, clipping along real good, ignoring the fruitcakes come to save her. I glanced back, grateful to find the others rounding the bend. After that, I had trouble taking my eyes off that girl in the cage. So did other men, the ones not holding the signs. A few were starting to yell things at her from somewhere in the crowd. Hey, baby, I'll teach you a few tricks.

A fresh-faced girl pulled away from the others and yelled, “That's him.” She jumped up and down and pointed, her ponytail bobbing. It was me she was pointing at. “Ivan. Ivan the Terrible.”

The girl in the cage shook the bars. A few of the guys clapped for her. I could see clenched white teeth against her pumpkin skin. I thought she was making growling noises, but I couldn't hear past the din.

“Ivan. Ivan the Terrible,” they were chanting now.

“Gonna hook the elephant?” yelled the ponytail girl. “Try it, Ivan. Try it.”

Some beefy greaser had hoisted himself up the sidewalk side of the parked truck. He was trying to reach into the cage. The girl had barely enough room to turn around, or pull away if a man's hand started pawing through the bars.

“It's okay,” I whispered, hoping Ronnie would hear me. Hoping that tiger girl would hear me, too.

We marched forward. The group booed and crowded close to Jacob, the newbie walking alongside us with the rope. He looked scared as hell.

“Be cool, Jacob,” I said, loud enough to be sure he heard. They all heard.

“Better listen to Ivan,” a girly boy yelled. “Listen up or you're gonna get beat.”

The two cops stepped forward and raised their arms and told everyone to stand back and settle down.

“We have a right to protest,” said a hungry-eyed boy holding a megaphone. The group quickly formed a circle around him and the cops. “We have a permit.”

“You can't obstruct the elephant walk,” the cop shouted. “You know the rules.”

Only here was a girl in a striped birthday suit and nobody caring squat about the guy diddling with her cage. We were almost alongside her by this point. So close I couldn't look at her. It felt obscene, to gawk into a cage with a girl inside. But I didn't want to lose sight of the asshole poking out from the far side of the truck. His fingers reaching. Nobody doing nothing about it.

We were less than ten feet away. “Hello, Ivan.” The tiger said quietly. The same unsmiling, oh-it's-you voice that I'd been clinging to across the miles, the years.

I flung my head up too quickly, spooking Ronnie, who flung her head too. I stared past the bars into my daughter's sea green eyes. I yelled at Ronnie to hold. She froze mid-stride.

“Told you I'd be here,” Sarah said fiercely. This was a voice I didn't recognize. But she
was
my girl, crushed into a metal cage. My little girl, nearly naked.

Jacob gripped his rope like he was drowning. Bliss trumpeted from down the stalled line. After that, you could hear a pin drop.

“Sarah, for god sakes. Get down from there. Cover yourself.”

“You can't make me, Ivan.”

“Sarah, for god sakes.”

“How does it feel, Ivan? You can't make me do anything I don't want to do.”

The damn cops, the damn crowd, they were all turned to her, gawping up at her painted body. And still that drooling creature hung off her cage. Something inside me snapped. Some piece I didn't know was me. I dug into Ronnie to stop her from swaying, screamed at her to hold, and then I lunged under her trunk and under Jacob's rope and flung myself towards the pick-up to land one solid strike into the small of dickwad's sweaty back.

* * *

When I lost Sarah that morning, my heart lurched so violently I think it might have stopped beating. She was supposed to be right there behind the rope, sitting cross-legged on her hay bundle. I flung around in circles, screaming her name, scaring the bejesus out of Happy, who fled like a rabbit despite his huge red shoes. Sarah. Sarah. Come here, baby. Where are you, baby?

“Jesus,” one of the hands yelled from across the barn. “Ivan, look.”

“Oh god, oh god,” from another.

“Ronnie. Ronnie's got her.”

Then the barn went quiet. Ronnie stood on her platform, waiting patiently for her chains, as still as a stuffed elephant, my baby girl between her front legs. My baby girl, crumpled in a ball on urine-soaked planks, clinging to 10,000 pounds of wild, her skinny white arms trying to wrap themselves around the great leathery ankle folds.

I tried not to think, tried not to hear Sarah's mother. I bent down and placed my stick on the ground, and when I came up, my legs felt too spongy to hold me.

“You're a good girl, Ronnie,” I crooned, starting at last to get my legs to work. I approached her in slow motion, holding out my empty hands. “Good girl, Ronnie.”