The Antagonist (26 page)

“Screw off, Rank, I’m serious.”

Rank advances on Kyle, neglecting to screw off. “Love me, my brother,” he says.

Kyle’s mouth is shut tight but Rank can tell he is clenching his teeth.

“Don’t touch me, Rank.”

“Let me love you,” Rank insists, moving in. “Come, my brother. Let us love together.”

Press pause. Is Rank aware of what he’s doing? Does he know what’s coming? Have he and Kyle locked eyes and — even from the depths of their mutual alcoholic fog — arrived at an understanding? Yes. Yes, yes.

Does Rank keep moving anyway, toward Kyle, with arms outstretched? Vulnerable? Heedless? In full knowledge?

He does. Let it be said. Let it be known.

Press play.

Kyle shoves Rank. It’s not a particularly violent shove. It’s half-hearted, if anything. But seeing as how the act is a surprise to neither of them, and even as he feels himself propelled backward, Rank has already decided to let it go. He’s going to take the shove, turn around, sit back down at the table with the girls, drink more, and wait for his friend to cool down.

Before any of this can happen, Kyle goes flying into the abruptly shrieking crowd. And Ivor is standing in his place, one massive bulge of a human being — eyes, veins, belly, muscles — hoarse voice sounding trumpet-clear above the shouts and music, shouting at Kyle as he skids across the floor: DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM? YOU GOT A FUCKING PROBLEM YOU FUCKING FUCKWAD YEAH?

Rank is in front of him going Ivor! Ivor! Ivor! And Ivor can’t even focus on him, his baby’s face entirely red and slicked as if with oil. Suddenly they are standing in an empty circle, as if the crowd has moved aside for them to breakdance. At the edges of the circle, Kyle wobbles to his feet, dripping in other people’s beer, and Rank moves to block him from Ivor’s view — the same way he’d positioned himself to block Adam from Kyle’s only moments before.

Rank hears faintly a “Jesus!” from Wade. A “holy shit,” from someone else. An “Oh my god,” from Emily.

I WILL FUCKING TEAR YOU APART, says Ivor, somehow managing to look directly through Rank to Kyle. No matter how deep Rank sticks his face into Ivor’s, Ivor seems incapable of focusing on him. Ivor’s eyes are enormous and both stupefied and hyper-aware like a stunned animal’s, a dying moose. Rank puts his hands out then and makes the mistake of glancing over to see if Kyle has done the wise thing and skedaddled for an exit. But apparently this is just what Kyle is in the process of doing when Ivor shoves Rank aside and launches himself across the circle.

The crowd makes a tidal sort of noise as Kyle tears his way through, women’s shrieks sounding above it like the cries of gulls. Rank plunges into the scattering human mass behind Ivor.

“Rank,” says Adam from somewhere. “Rank. His gun.”

Oh that’s right, thinks Rank from some distant place in his mind. It’s familiar, this distant place. He hasn’t been there for quite some time, not since looking over at his mother in the driver’s seat and thinking: Oh that’s not good. I don’t think that can be good.

Ivor does carry a gun, doesn’t he, thinks Rank from his distant place. Yes that’s right isn’t it; that’s what Wade told us.

There’s no time, then, to develop strategy or think about what he’s doing or try to holler some kind of sanity into Ivor. Rank simply pursues Ivor’s black expanse of Motörhead T-shirt into the fluttering crowd and throws himself upon it. Ivor is a creature of flab but only the same way a bear is. That is, bears are fat, as Ivor is fat. But underneath, still bears.

What Rank must do is kneel on him; pin his arms.

The crowd is in his ears. Ivor’s body is heaving and boiling against him.

Ivor has a fever, thinks Rank in his distant place — he is maybe a little insane in his distant place. He remembers looking at what happened to Sylvie’s head and thinking: Oh — you know what? That’s not too bad, actually. The doctors will be able to fix that.

Poor Ivor, thinks Rank. Flu season. Not enough vitamin C.

“Rank get off of me, you’re heavy, guy,” moans Ivor beneath him. And suddenly he bucks.

“Ivor, stay down.”

“LET THE FUCK GO OF MY ARMS YOU PIECE OF SHIT I AM LOOKING OUT FOR YOU.”

Rank braces his legs and rides him thinking
gun
. Gun. Gun.

“WE DO NOT TOLERATE SHIT IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT. RICHARD WILL HAVE NO SHIT IN HIS PLACE. RICHARD IS FUCKING SICK OF YOU FUCKING UNIVERSITY KIDS — OH RANK,” Ivor interrupts himself abruptly and starts to shudder.

“Calm down Ivor, please,” Rank says into the gulf of Ivor’s sweltering shoulder blades.

“Ow,” says Ivor. “Ow, ow.”

Then Kyle is with him in the circle. “Rank you need help man?”

But Rank needs no help at all anymore. He climbs off Ivor, the front of Rank’s body going cool where the two of them have sweat through each other’s clothes. He stands for a minute beside Kyle, then kneels down again and even though he is very much in his distant place now, he is very much where he was the day his mother drove him out to serve his time at the Youth Centre, having insisted Gord stay home, so she could talk to him mother to son, so she could cry herself hoarse at the wheel and keep reaching up to blouse-sleeve the water from her eyes, even though he is very much in that distant, delicate realm where his inner voice speaks with strange formality, prefacing all directives with polite preambles like:
Maybe you should; Perhaps it would be best
. As in
Maybe you should unbuckle her seatbelt for when the paramedics come. Perhaps it would be best not to move her.
Even though he is in that place now, or perhaps because he is, he manages to — without giving it too much thought — roll Ivor onto his back. Because if he were to give it any thought, he would be thinking it’s probably not okay that Ivor needs Rank to roll him onto his back at this point. It’s probably not okay that Ivor isn’t doing it himself.

Rank can feel the sweat on Ivor, too, already cooling. He flops him over with a grunt and glances up at Kyle, Kyle already moving backward.

Kyle who helps by saying: “Whoa. Whoa, Rank. Jesus, man.”

There’s no music anymore. Somebody — it might be Adam again — says the word “doctor.” Then “ambulance.” Then “cops.” Ranks look up, and he does see Adam, but Adam is turned away from him, submerged deep in the surrounding crowd, and all Rank gets is a blank, eyeless profile of jawline and the wire-glint of glasses. Rank feels a pair of legs close by, looks up, discovers Richard. Richard seems confused and pit-faced and a little sad, thinks Rank from his distant place. His distant place is a place, it seems, of a kind of unconcerned compassion for all men. Richard clears his throat.

“What the fuck,” he wants to know, “is this?”

Ambulance, says somebody. Cop.

“Rank,” says Richard. “Would you please help me get him to my office?”

Perhaps it would be best, thinks Rank, to go.

In thinking this, he has managed miraculously to transport himself into the parking lot — it’s science fiction all of a sudden, beam me up, Scotty, beam us out of here, the planet’s about to blow. And now he moves at warp speed, now the Millennium Falcon makes its escape as stars smear up against its windshield like gnats, Christmas lights on houses blazing streaks in his periphery.

08/17/09, 12:44 a.m.

GORD CRIED AND CRIED
and cried and cried and cried. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a man cry like that, before or since. It’s not something a lot of men do, and when you see it happen, you understand why. When men cry, particularly men who are your father, there is something huge and elemental about it — something that feels entirely wrong and yet entirely natural all at the same time, like volcanoes; like the planet regurgitating. And it continued for days, the crying, intermittently. In between, he would knot his face up and scowl at the hospital administrators and the funeral directors — anybody who had a whiff of “the man” about them, anyone who could potentially be considered managerial timber by the powers that be at SeaFare packers. He’d bark insults at them, urge them to kiss his scrawny Celtic ass, then the moment we were alone in the rental car or the house or the funeral home or cemetery the crying would start up all over again.

And he would cling to me at these times. I think his intention, through his grief, was to be fatherly and sort of take me in his arms and offer comfort, but it didn’t work because I was so big and he was so small. He’d end up just sort of wrapping his arms around my waist and burying his face in my sweater like a child. It’s okay Gordie, it’s okay Gordie he’d say into my chest as if trying to speak through it and converse directly with my heart, and as I stood there feeling, even through my own grief, how ridiculous we were.

When I was in the hospital, being treated for absolutely nothing except the shock of seeing my mother caved in (and that shock more or less manifested itself in sleepiness — I was in the hospital for being
sleepy
as they pieced Sylvie together), I’d open my eyes every once in a while and a small, dark-haired man with John Lennon glasses and a sort of science-teacher look about him would be standing there. And he’d smile and glance over at me as my eyes were opening as if he just happened to be standing in my room this whole time enjoying the play of sunlight across my bed sheets or something, and wasn’t it fortuitous that I was now awake so we could chat. And because my town is small, he was familiar to me, so I politely said hello.

“Your lawyer Trisha introduced us a while back,” said Owen Findlay. “Do you remember?”

I didn’t. Didn’t matter. Owen was from that point on a daily fixture in the lives of Gord and me. He had apparently been appointed to welcome my mother and me to the Youth Centre that day, had been waiting for us, all set to guide us through some paperwork, offer a bit of a tour and — his particular area of expertise — be reassuring. The more I got to know Owen, later, the more I wished Sylvie could have lived just long enough to meet him, to see what a sweet guy he was, to hear his reassurances about the way my life would unfold in the following months. I think she’d had no idea what was in store for me — how could she? Juvenile detention was a phenomenon beyond her realm of being. I think she must have been imagining prison tattoos, forced gay sex, eventual heroin addiction — that’s the only thing that can account for the way she lost it in the car. If only she could have been greeted at the door by Owen’s open, well-shaved face, sniffed the humble waft of Ivory soap that hung about him, seen the calming way he had of rocking on his heels, hands-in-pockets, in his science-teacher loafers and cords.

But in the car it had been a frenzy. She managed to hold on to the wheel but her demeanour was that of a bee that had flown in through the car window just as it was being rolled up and now was trapped and slamming its body against the glass in ever-increasing alarm. The conversation became pure adrenalin — neither of us quite knew what we were saying, or what the other one was talking about. My mother and I, we had never spoken like this before. It was always Gord I shouted and railed at, and he who did the shouting and railing in return. Sylvie and I usually turned to each other for relief — for a little peace and quiet once Hurricane Gord had finished raging.

She had pretty much liquefied the moment we pulled out of the driveway, when only moments before she’d been entirely in control. She had explained to Gord he would not be coming along on the drive to deliver me to my punishment for having brained Mick Croft, and Gord, surprisingly, hadn’t kicked up too much of a fuss. Sylvie made her case in theological terms. Like any good Catholic, Gord could only bow before the inviolable bond of the Madonna and child, so when Sylvie explained things on that level —
we need to talk mother to son
— he had little choice but to nod and flick on the TV. Gord had exhausted himself in the courtroom anyway, and now that the verdict had come down and Trish had refused to hand over the judge’s home phone number and/or address, he didn’t quite know what to do next. My father’s wrath, and the immense, inexhaustible supply of energy he always drew from it, was, for the first time I’d ever witnessed, spent.

She even kissed him on the top of his prickly head before we left, which troubled me because my parents usually took such care to not go near each other, at least when I was around.

She was being, I think now, very careful.

But at the first stop sign we came to, she let go, braking the car and collapsing across the steering wheel as if gone boneless.

I remember her telling me, “You don’t have to
be
this. You could be anything.”

“Be what, be what?” I was saying, freaked out because of the way she was crying — great whooping sobs that convulsed her entire body. And I had done that to her. It was because of me.

“Don’t have to be what? I don’t know what I am, let alone what I’m supposed to be.”

“What they’re going to try to make you be now. What your father tries to make you be.”

“I never wanted to be that anyway,” I shouted.

“
I know
what you are,” Sylvie shouted back.

“No
you don’t
,” I continued to shout (and, warning: it gets very teenage here). “Everybody thinks they know
all about me
but they don’t! Nobody knows
anything
about me!”

I was thinking about Constable Hamm —
I see exactly where you’re headed, son
. I was thinking of Gord thwacking me in the sternum.
This son of a bitch right here.

We went back and forth like this in our mutual incoherence. That is, I was incoherent and panicky, whereas Sylvie, I think, was in the process of elucidating something, however heartsick she may have been while attempting to do it. We were on the highway now. I just wanted her to stop crying that way. It would be okay if she were trickling a little, but the sobs wracked her body like she was being flogged. I even thought she might pull over and ralph out the driver’s-side door at some point, like one of my high school buddies on the way to a dance.

“We can’t continue like this,” she gasped after a few heaving moments of speechlessness. “We don’t have to.”

“I have to go to jail, Mom,” I said, watching her because there was a weird momentousness to the way she was speaking all of a sudden. “We can’t, like, go on the lam.”

“After this, Gordie,” she said, shaking her head and reaching up to swipe an entire forearm across her eyes. “After this, everything changes.”

Needless to say she was right. Of course, that wasn’t what she meant. She didn’t mean that in about eight minutes she would take a blind turn while driving slightly on the wrong side of the yellow line as she finished blouse-sleeving another gush of tears from her eyes and a car would be coming just a titch over the speed limit in the opposite direction and the vehicles would brush against each other like two illicit lovers at a party, spin in opposite directions, they into a ditch, we into yet another oncoming vehicle before discovering a ditch of our own. That’s not what Sylvie meant by
everything changes
. At the time, however, I didn’t understand exactly she what she meant.

She meant, it took me years to understand, that she was leaving Gord. She and I, that is. The thing I always wanted; my ultimate, never-spoken wish.

Which of course is what ended up happening anyway.

08/17/09, 3:25 a.m.

I just realized I’ve got one more story to tell you.

I started playing hockey again a few years ago, can you believe it? Twelve years after stumping out of the locker room back in university and making my buddy Adam so proud of my principled stand against the cracking of human skulls. It happened not long after I bought my house. One of the first things I noticed about the neighbourhood, standing with the realtor at the upstairs window, was an outdoor community rink a couple of backyards beyond mine.

I watched it fill up with kids from the first snowfall in November and not empty out again until March. On especially cold days, rink sounds — the
pock
of pucks hitting the boards and the slash of skates gouging ice — flew across the frozen air into my yard. It sounded like all the games were taking place directly beneath my bedroom, and if I jumped out my window I’d land smack at centre ice like a dropped puck.

I’d stand there some evenings watching the kids going around and around, making their touching Hail Mary passes from one end of the ice to the other, and eventually I noticed that during a certain block of time on Thursday evenings, the kids got bigger. I took in the occasional pot belly here, a faceful of beard there. I saw how different guys seemed to come and go from week to week, some of them even showing up in the middle of a game, brandishing their sticks and being immediately accepted onto the ice. Next thing I know I’m at Canadian Tire buying extension cords but standing, for some reason, in the sporting goods section, feeling annoyed at the crappy selection of skates.

Flash forward two years later and at the age of thirty-four I’m finally doing my father proud — heading downtown to the arena every week to play in a league. And let me tell you, old-timer’s hockey is the best hockey going. There are no psychotic parents in the stands, no purple-faced coaches, none of that sweaty, draft-pick desperation. Guys can be old, guys can be pudgy; guys are slow. Guys are sometimes even — as in the case of our goalie for a couple of years until pregnancy interrupted our winning streak — women.

There’s only one downside, which is this: when guys go into cardiac arrest.

The first time it happened, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. On the opposite side of the ice from us, Hamish Powell from the Stoney Creek Choppers bounced off the bench where he’d been sitting, mouth agape, exactly like someone from my former church might have done in a moment of holy ecstasy. The spirit could hit you like that if you happened to have the right preacher — say, a preacher like Beth — in front of you, egging it on. One minute you’re letting the words wash over you, weaving back and forth in relative peace, hands in the air, and the next it’s like a holy bolt has entered through your anus.

But that wasn’t what had happened to Hamish, even if that’s what it looked like to me. Wow, I thought. Here of all places. Hamish has seen the light. Hamish has been
saved
.

I remarked to a guy on the bench beside me: “Hamish —” but didn’t have time to say anything else, because my teammate, an internist at Saint Joseph’s named Wally who had helpfully identified my broken tibia the year before as I lay writhing and gasping on the ice, was now flying across the rink.

As I watched Wally arrive at the other side I still didn’t grasp what was going on. Meanwhile another guy had positioned himself on top of Hamish.
They’re fighting
, I thought.
Hamish has gone nuts!
But that was when I realized the other guy was a colleague of Wally’s — an EMT, to be precise. And that’s when I heard Wally yell for a defibrillator.

Did you know sports arenas are legally obliged to keep heart defibrillators on the premises, precisely for occasions such as this? It happens, I was soon to discover, all the time. Old guys like us who spend our weekdays in desk chairs and our weekends on couches and our mealtimes dumping gravy all over everything decide we can just lace up a pair of skates one fine winter’s day and hit the ice like we were seventeen again. It’s a bit sobering, Adam. It’s sobering to be sitting in what you realize is a kind of temple devoted to the worship of youthful, masculine vigour and watch a guy get taken down so decisively, as if in reproach. Like a too-big kid getting his hand slapped reaching for cookies.
You’ve had enough,
decrees the fucker-in-the-sky.

Hamish was okay, but I would never meet him on the ice again. I found this out from Wally a few weeks later after a game. Usually I liked talking to Wally, because he often shared gross details from his medical career. He once told me he’d learned to do stitches in med school by practising on the flesh of dead pigs. I couldn’t get the image out of my head — a bunch of guys sitting in a room sewing pigs.

Still. I wasn’t all that keen to learn the details of what happened to Hamish. Wally was keen to give them, however. Wally loved talking about his work, and he was, he said now, perpetually fascinated by the workings of the human heart. We men, he told me, we walk around with no idea how fragile our hearts might be.

We were standing in my kitchen, Wally watching me slather sauce onto spare ribs in preparation for a post-game barbecue, one of my all-time favourite rituals of defiance against the winter months. I have been known to barbecue while wearing ski-goggles, to protect my eyes against ice pellets ripping at my face in gale-force winds.

I replied something like
Yeah yeah yeah
as I slathered, just letting Wally ramble about ventricles for a while. I was happy Hamish was still with us, but the image of him popping up from the bench like a jack-in-the-box with his mouth in an agonized gape hadn’t left me.

Then, from out of nowhere (or at least that’s how it seemed to me, considering I’d been working so hard at not paying attention), Wally started talking about the tasering deaths in the news. Do you remember that scandal, Adam? The cops got a bit zap-happy with their new, supposedly non-lethal toy and a handful of people getting zapped promptly disproved the whole non-lethal thing. Whoa, remarked the cops as multiple zap-ees dropped like stones. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Cue public outrage.