The Push & the Pull (10 page)

“Okay, left here,” Andy told her. “We're close now. There, on your right.”

Oh God. The Humane Society.

“They have a little trail where you can walk any dog you want.”

“Andy —”

“I know. I know. No dog. That doesn't mean we can't walk one. It doesn't even cost any money.”

Parking the car at the animal shelter, she could see clearly how Stan had to lean his curved chest to raise this very gearshift into park.

The twin smells of urine and disinfectant filled her nostrils as they stepped into the animal shelter's cacophony of yelping, whining and barking. Andy's back, no longer tiny, advanced into the room,
untouched by her desperate hand. If dogs can smell fear, what do they smell off me?

The phrase
your father and I
sat in her mouth like an inflamed tooth while she stood in the reception area listening to her articulate, attentive son chat with the patient staff as two adjacent doors opened and closed, flooding the room with smells and whines, smells and whines.

“Should I try to keep the dog at my left as I walk?”

“These guys are a little out of practice with that kind of walking. Keep both hands on the leash and you'll be fine.”

It was shockingly but fittingly easy to fall in behind Andy as he passed through a heavily scratched brown door into bedlam. Grilled troughs ran through the cement floor beneath their feet. A garden hose hung coiled on a dull cinder-block wall. Walking the aisle between cages was like switching on a food processor of fur. Brown, black and golden shapes stirred in their grey cages. Despite the movement and the bars, Pat saw their dark eyes quite clearly, saw, even as they spun or scratched, the sphere of each eye, saw those little bubbles of oil surrounded by unkempt fur.

“Look at this one,” Andy called, crossing to a gawky, elongated stretch of fluff and haunch. “I'd like to take them all out, but . . .” Ten minutes later, shopping bags stuffed into his pocket, Andy guided his mother and a nearly grown collie-something out into the play area.

“I like that she's quiet. I don't think she's scared, just patient.”

Pat marched on, holding her speech like a revolver in her pocket. The dog trotted left and right uncertainly, never fully straining the leash but always looking to the rest of the enclosed yard.

“Do you want to run? Hmm?” Andy tore ahead then back.

Catching him on a return sprint, Pat cautioned, “Maybe the puppy isn't used to running.”

“Mom, she's a puppy.” He slowed purposefully on his next pass. “I could do my next science fair project on dog training.”

“That's a good idea.”

“So I'd train her —”

“Andy, think of your father.” Pat finally jumped for the light. “You're old enough and smart enough to see your dad's not getting better.”

This time Andy didn't bolt off. The dog resumed its calculations of
leash, human, yard
.

“Instead of getting better, though, he could maybe live differently.”

“What do you mean?”

Stretching her eyes, she stayed their tears. “Well, he could live with other people like him.”

“Who else is like him?”

“Or with a nurse.” His eyes were on hers now, also wet, and she went for it. “But not with me. I don't want to live with your dad any more. Don't cry, honey. Lots of kids are better off when their parents are divorced. Come here. An — drew, come here.”

She focused solely on his hand trying to squirm out of the leash's looped handle, so she, too, forgot about the dog. Free of the leash thrown from Andy's grasp, perhaps stimulated by the run, the puppy bolted.

Glaring back at his mother with his teary, rotten-apple face, Andy slammed the fence gate so hard behind him that the latch did not catch. Yelling after him, Pat watched the gate jerk shut and fling back open. Walking quickly, grateful for the consumption of worry after the corrosion of guilt, she reshuffled the remaining cards in her hand.
There or not, I can't make him any healthier.
Or
I'm better for you if I'm happy
. Or maybe even
We only have one life
. These crisp, reassuring cards filled her mind's hand, and she did not immediately notice the puppy's turn for the open gate.

“Andy. Andy, the dog.”

Andy had long since run around the building and out of sight. Quickening into a ridiculously fast walk, Pat could see the blatant geometric impossibility of her reaching the gate before the dog did.

“Here, girl. Here, girl,” she called, half running.

The bright blue leash dangled behind the galloping dog, and as it passed through the open gate, Pat hoped its handle would catch on something. There'd be a yelp, but they'd get her. No such luck. Passing and shutting the gate herself, Pat rounded the corner of the building to see Andy running into a field on the opposite side of the road, and the puppy, leash snaking out behind, following.

She saw so much. The driver's lips moved as he talked, head bent
just slightly to his passenger. The speeding tires locked suddenly on the dark pavement. Her boy turned back at the sound of the brakes. Caught, finally, the blue leash snared under one tire, grew taut, and whipped the dog under another.

“Don't look,” she thought to yell, already running, already undoing her coat. “Don't look,” at the unbelievably fluffy chest split and pumping fast blood, at the small, sharp teeth broken into red and yellow pools. Pat made it to the body before the driver could even open his door.

Unwilling to ask her to move, looking now at the top of her head, he temporarily forgot about his window crank and yelled over talk radio into the solid window. “I'm sorry. I didn't see — Where'd he come from?” Only the passenger saw the boy approach then freeze at the sight of this tall woman gathering up the dog in her own coat. Her bloody hands were long and slender even as they strained around the weight gathered in her darkening coat.

A few years later, arguing with his mother on the phone again, Andrew recalled those hefting arms and her cheque-book euthanasia. “You helped the dog,” he snapped at her over the phone.

“Who did I help?” she asked him back, asking but not quite saying,
I was helping you.

Another bright pill lolls on the highway's black tongue. As soon as he notices the roadside daub of canary yellow, his pace quickens slightly. His thighs, hounds trembling on a scent, suspect that the bright yellow in the distance is another cyclist. He cranks out another few kilometres, thighs straining at the leash, without knowing whether the jolt of yellow is indeed another rider or, if so, whether the rider's coming or going. Will he meet or chase the other rider? Meat or cheese?

Finally, he sees a gap between the yellow dot and a distant white house close. Speed and colour all but certify that the shape is another rider, not a runner, in this brightest of sports. More even than those for running, cycling jerseys, jackets and helmets leap out in the highest voltage yellows, high-frequency magentas and radioactive blues. Cycling socks usually collar the ankle in bands of colour, if not some flag or image, reggae or tartan, cartoon or psychedelic, while the jogger pounds on in mute white. In part, these jolts of colour are designed to awaken the sleepy eyes of drivers, to be anything other than asphalt grey, minivan blue or evergreen.

Cyclists have an honour roll of the fallen, riders killed by drivers, firm legs crumpled by tired eyes. Thousands of kilometres ahead of him on the Trans-Can, near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Dugald Christie, a BC lawyer, was struck down on his third cross-Canada ride to campaign for better legal aid. Australians lose their Olympians to drivers; Amy Gillett and Darren Smith were wiped out on training runs. Mark told Andrew that urban bicycle couriers annually ride a silent midnight vigil for their fallen.

Henry Ford is credited with inventing the assembly line. He didn't. He adapted the assembly line from the disassembly line of the slaughterhouse. Carcasses, then cars, strung on a line.

But more than just safety brightens cycling clothing. Every squirt of primary colour is also an homage to cycling's industrial origins.

The near nudity of runners is surpassed only by swimmers. For cyclists, colour squirts into their clothing to thank test tube and lab, to flag this enduring fusion of a natural skeleton to an engineered one. The only earth tone on a cyclist is mud.

Lab, indeed. Snorting above his curved handlebars and breathable gloves, he switches his cycling computer over to its stopwatch. If he had a sextant or some kind of calibrated looking glass, he could clock the seconds the other rider takes to travel between two points and then calculate his speed. Or hers.

Shrewd fatigue finally tables a debate, solemnly lists the casualties of his pointlessly chasing Yellow. What does this three-kilometres-an-hour leap in pace and pulse yield? What does it cost? Why are you faster for someone else? And your pace — if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Fatigue's a saboteur poisoning the ear, an isolationist. Yellow and I could chat route and chafe, swap tales of flats and broken chains.
Have you ever been without patches and used a fiver to keep yourself going? Money in lieu of a patch? Why not a piece of your map? Money is stronger.
Or we could build a communal meal.
My chili and your .
. . please don't have chili. Maybe he (she) has vegetables. A starburst red pepper. A buttery avocado. Does he (she) know that “pannier” originally meant “bread basket”? Companion. Company. We'll break the bread we carry. (Keep your Nutella buried.)

These bright marbles roll in a green bowl. Peak to uneven peak, this valley stretches for nearly ten kilometres. On flat land, free of the panniers, one pedal stroke, one plunging shank, would roll Andrew's frame roughly two metres. Here on the New Brunswick highway's curling ribbon, fully laden, spilling down one hill, falling back the next, he'll sink left then right more than five thousand times to end this valley.

Who doesn't want to be faster? Riding trails in Kingston or Halifax, he had been certain that some guys rode just to hunt out a race, ears cocked for a distant rustle in the leaves or the zip of fat tires along dirt. Every three or four weeks some single rider or, even more ominous, a silent pair, would find him unawares, sliding noiselessly into the bottom of a narrow switchback climb or shooting a pocket of coaster. These grandsons of men who were paid to sweat now paid to do it.

Their unannounced races started with nothing more than a shaking of the trees. Asses inched back on seats. The balls of the feet were re-discovered. Knees swung out to cut finer corners, and yet no race was officially announced. If someone pulled onto the main artery beneath the power lines, when he turned into your already burning climb, you could no more declare, “To the willow tree” than you could ask for a handicap. And yet everyone knew exactly what each turn or run meant. Fingerless gauntlets were everywhere thrown. When he had described these unannounced but unmistakable forest races to Betty, she asked, “Are you riding bikes or rulers? Me, Big Dick. Ride money bike fast.”

Yes, Betty, yes, yes, yes. And yet here he is gunning for the yellow jersey in the distance, all considerations save for the pass wiped away. The thrill of pushing past and the fear of being swallowed are hardwired, undiscussed but unforgettable.

The yellow rider hits the bottom of the climb out of this valley. The road is a tailor's tape measuring rise and fall. Still on the flat, Andrew has a specious gain on Yellow, crunching the space between them but not the time. The bottom of the hill will bounce him back, flip time Yellow's way. Ascent is mapped with the burn in heart and lungs. A climb actually taxes slightly different muscles in the legs. Ground is won or lost on the butcher's wire of a hill, two strung hearts scraped on the inclined blade. Five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain, Spain's Big Mig, lived his climbing years with a standing heart rate of twenty-eight beats per minute. Back at UNS, nearly forsaking his bike for a library carrel, Andrew had felt his heart rate climbing back up to the average sixty-eight.

Now he's close enough to the other rider to see a glistening calf (androgynously shaved, impressively chiselled). In the pass of an actual race,
attacking
as it is accurately called, the attacker would surely fuel off the smell of his opponent, must push for that mossy aluminum whiff just when it's most needed. Entering the climb, Andrew realizes that this could also flip, that this very air would also be traded. The passing fuel you take from me will soon give me yours.

“Prison saved us from batch,” Andrew told Betty one night over dinner. “When you're young, you can live with a phrase, especially a phrase of your parents, for years without catching all its angles.
Batch lots
, Dad used to say of the two of us. It was years before I got
bachelor
. After Mom left, when I stayed with Dad, he'd say we were
batching it
. He'd already been teaching in prison for a few years.”

“Bachelors by day, bachelors by night,” Betty concluded. “What was it, wieners 'n' beans on Monday nights? Fish sticks on Tuesdays?”

“Pretty much. But more than just our diet changed. Something about prison, all that control, all those rules — he got more managerial, sure, but that could have been just the disease. It was a long climb down, but not a steady one. Ability would plateau for years and then drop. He still drove until I was seventeen.”

“He drove until he could stop.”

“No, really, he was okay. Just errands in town. Got himself to work and back. But prison, it made him more scheming.”

“Don't tell me he tried to join a heist crew.”

“More like a painting crew. One night, eating dinner right here, he just looked up and said, ‘Yellow.' He suddenly wanted the dining room painted yellow. We didn't always admit what he couldn't do any more. Repainting? That meant admitting you now had to pay someone to repaint the walls your old hands, your hands and your wife's hands, had painted a few years ago. Let it grey another year. Get a bigger TV and let the scuffs hang.”