The Push & the Pull (11 page)

“Maybe he just read some advice in a magazine. My mom probably
wrote
articles about divorced dads and redecorating.”

“It was more like training than decorating. He hired a painter to paint and to teach me to paint. Older guy, more expensive, but he had the moves and was willing to share them.
Set the brush, then move it. Look and your hand will follow. You find wet roller seams with your ear, not your eye
. I'd grown up doing this, listening to instructions,
guiding my hands with Dad's instructions. If he was no longer able to advise me, he hired somebody who could. He always said, ‘You can buy anything, if you pay enough.'”

“That sounds like a dad, all right,” said Betty.

“When everything was limited — the shirts he could wear, the chairs he could use — his brain changed.
Evolved
is probably the word. The arms lost reach so the imagination gained.”

Stan thinned everywhere save for a little paunch, his “goody bag.” His shoulder blades sliced through his sallow back. His collarbone was a bow. Most relevantly, his sense of touch diminished with every millimetric curl of his fingers, every hidden fraying of nerve endings.

His tracheotomy tube, that arc of silver respiration, was replaced twice a week. Working slowly, usually after a shower, air-drying in his saggy boxer shorts, Stan would boil a small aluminum pot of water on the stove to sterilize the alternate tube, its two inserts for night and day and the glass jar that would house them. The bent fingers of his tented right hand could fit into the wide grips of a pair of rubber-handled tongs while the idle left was indeed quick work for the red devil of the glowing stove burner.

Younger, Andy simply assumed there was no
other
cause than Disease No.1 for the blunt, nail-less fingers of his father's left hand. Surely the fingers were also curled by the foul gravity that was changing the orbit of his ribs. In the kitchen at four years old, when he saw Stan's left hand support his right and a saucepan handle in it, when the dangling left fingers brushed the angry red spiral of a maximized stove burner, when the burned fingers came up weeping, Andy thought adults, not his dad, felt less pain.

“Dad, your fingers.”

“Oh, damn.”

Two, maybe three years would pass before some casual question of Andy's about the blunted, penile fingers of Stan's left hand prompted Stan to clarify their history of partial amputation. “No, no. I lost them to infection,” he said. “If the fingertip gets really infected, the nail becomes like a roof. Off they went.” Stan drew the clean, bent fingertips of his right hand over the butt ends of the left.

Betty didn't wait, couldn't wait, more than a week between hearing about Stan's hand and asking to feel Andrew's imitation of it. Love
lets you out of one cage and puts you in another. Andrew rubbed the knuckles of his fist across her hips. Not his fingertips, not a tongue, not even his smooth palm. Knuckles and then knuckle pinches. His whole fist sank between her thighs to give her a slightly gentler version of what wrestlers call a crotch tilt. Her message had been unmistakable. Show me. Show me. No one had ever cared so much about what he cared about. But then, after a meeting with his father's lawyer and a dinner with his mother, he could no longer hold on to the two things he cared about most.

Coaxing him to sleep one night, she'd given him her yoga advice. “Your body is the past, your mind is the future. Your breath unites them in the present.” That winter he stopped breathing easily.

Fewer than two hundred metres of hill separate Andrew and the nameless rider in front of him. Although this distance will quickly double, then double again, seconds after the yellow-jerseyed rider crests the hill, Andrew feels the math is in. Unless Yellow is playing the touring cyclist's version of cat and mouse, unless his (her) pace in this valley was an alluring feint to draw him in, Andrew will claim the next valley. What a charming prelude to a shared dinner. Say there, Crushed One, do you have plans this evening? Oy, Vanquished, got any cheese?

Once, twice, he glimpses the silver in Yellow's mirror but nothing more. No concerned eyes. No revealing whiskers.

Up until this final inclined stretch of the race, he has told himself he only wanted the challenge and then, honestly, the company. An evening of chat. Stories of the road. But the climb doesn't believe that. You want to win. Win what?

In Kingston, when he had learned to ride trails with Mark, there had been plenty of post-ride chats, but Mark was the exception to many rules. Meeting other riders on Kingston's Fort Henry trails or the Long Lake run in Halifax, Andrew found that the chiselled calves and thighs were usually accompanied by a wiring shut of the jaw. Most riders don't speak; they just spit and change gears, maybe leaning over to pointedly examine the transmission on your bike. Groupo? Skins? If anything, they ask, “How many k?” In ways, Betty was right: they ride rulers not bikes.

Late sunlight pours down on both climbers like boiling oil. To meet in the next hour might mean sharing camp with a stranger. He'll miss his chance to walk around half-naked airing his swampy nethers.

Nothing unites them more than Yellow's refusal to brake or waver. Andrew will almost certainly take the next valley, but for now they're fighting tooth and metal claw. However much his thighs burn with
fatigue and lactic acid, envy makes them burn hotter as he watches Yellow scale and crest the peak of the hill. Yellow raises his back to stretch it out, while Andrew remains cramped in a climbing crouch. Yellow rolls his head left then right before pouring himself into the drop. All the while Andrew is hip-deep in pain. What pure, murderous envy.

When Andrew crests the same hill, his envy turns into fuel. Yellow currently has the descent, but Andrew has the legs. He draws some water, stretches his neck and prepares to scream downhill into a pass. Yet he doesn't crank the pedals. He stops pedalling but doesn't brake. The distant yellow dot moves. Inertia seeps from Andrew's tires. His dwindling stop is comically slow. Finally, his right toe clips out and comes down. He dismounts and stretches to guarantee Yellow a lead. Christ for a beer.

Gulping tepid water in fading sunlight, he finally sees valley, not road, province, not climb, and he lets Yellow go, gladly. This will be his turn from the brothel gates, his bride at the altar, the predictable career he abandoned. Pursuing and passing the other rider would have reduced days of this trip to a simple chase: attack then defend. Introspection and wisdom would have been tossed aside as dead weight. And, having let Yellow go, he can return to wondering if it was a man or a woman. Paused here on his hilltop, watching Yellow fade into the sunset, he can concentrate on his erection without fixating on man
or
woman. He can think person or body. He definitely thinks
legs
.

Andy and Stan also had their races. Races with each other and against each other. Races against time. Once, they raced together slowly on a crowded bus from Kingston to Toronto. They would race again when they got off in Toronto, travelling from bus station to doctor's office. All of those races in bone.

Andy was thirteen years old, and soon — four to six months — he'd be taller than his dad.

“You just wait, Stanner; I'll give you progress reports on your bald spot.”

“Evil, evil boy.”

“Or
spots
, I should say.”

“You remember what a
will
is, don't you?”

Whenever Andy saw Pat — Christmas, the once or twice they got away in March — his height was always the first thing she mentioned. “It's what I do,” he occasionally said or, “It's my job.” He never told her that Stan was shrinking.

Despite fading muscle and warping bone, Stan had still been driving in Kingston. His job at Allenville Correctional. Grocery stores selected not for value or quality but for their immunity from left-hand turns, their proximity to slow side roads. Always the dry cleaners. For years Andy thought that's just how men's pants got cleaned, making no connection to Stan's races to the washroom. Stan could drive around for small errands in Kingston. But a drive into Toronto? Impossible.

Once a year they devoted a whole day to thirty minutes with Dr. Khan, one of the specialists. Even today Andy couldn't say whether Khan was Neuro or Rehab, OT or PT. Back then he didn't know what those acronyms stood for, didn't even know the name of Stan's disease or if it had one. If his were a condition Andy had ever seen in a doctor's office, on television, in a movie, maybe Stan would have used a name around the house. In life before a web search,
syringomyelia
was a
private noun, a unique coin. If it were something exclusively internal, a hidden worker's strike in the pancreas, a length of intestine blown like rails in war, a name might help carry Andy in. But here, arms bent ruinously, one leg curling out, the other frozen, what was in a name? By the time he met Betty, he had said the word aloud less than five times.

By the second hour, Andy felt entirely coated in bus, slick, infectious bus. He could not avoid overhearing multiple conversations about what someone reckoned was a good idea for starting up a business, and what
They
said about this, and what
They
were now saying about that. If he heard a single adjective, it was
different
, and invariably it was used approvingly for some junk you could buy. Although the ride there always felt longer than the trip home, he knew that nothing would be as biblically interminable as the wait in Dr. Khan's excessively bright waiting room. The hands on the beige clock wouldn't move any faster than the orange squares and green cones of the office's huge, ugly painting. Each year, a few ambitious weeds grew among the tar and pebbles on the rooftops beneath the one (sealed) window.

Mid-route, the highway blurring along beside them, Stan dropped his magazine to the gummy bus floor, and Andy knew they had a rush on their hands. “Let's go,” Stan said, meaning
piss crisis
.

First Andy had to get him up. He stepped over Stan's sharp knees and into the aisle. Surging with the pitch and roll of the bus, Andy steadied his legs and reached down for Stan's hands, finally looking into his face. A drawstring of alarm had tightened around each eye.

It would be another few years — not until Andrew regularly rode trail with the swelling balloon of his bladder folded palpably into the sack of his insides, bobbing there above the saddle's wedge — before he understood his father's binary bladder. Not until he himself pissed off a tilted bike frame did he realize that Stan and his pissing were inseparable from his body's other warps and retreats. Here at thirteen, Andy did know that Stan's sense of touch was diminishing radically. The burns from a stove element. The way he'd consensually let his shoulder fall into a door frame to break a fall. Shadowing this body day in and day out, Andy was beginning to understand that for Stan, standing upright was a largely visual operation. He had to glance
around just to stay in place. And what difference did understanding a degenerative condition make to living with it? Thursday's epiphany did nothing to Friday's chores, to the recurrent challenge of pulling up pants. What was theory compared to the necessity of a sandwich? The internal body, inside was a foreign, unpronounceable worry, each organ a continent away. So many shop windows were smashed nightly that neither of them fully attended to the disease's backroom legislation that was quietly seizing all of Stan's assets. Really, Stan was only feeling extremes, inside or out. A half-full bladder wasn't even noticed. Three-quarters was a nag he couldn't quite place.

Stan's arms seemed to fade a millimetre or two each time Andy hauled him up. Halfway between sitting and standing upright, Stan's hands and arms began to pull away from his chest. In their living room or here in the bus aisle, Andy had to arc his spine, bend his knees, step back if he could to take up the slack, Stan's hands coming at his shoulders like the paws of a huge but aging dog. Stan's too-vertical arms looked as if he hoped to fly out of his seat.

Upright and semi-evolved again, Stan exhaled victoriously before proceeding to battle-test his legs and knees, leaning from one foot to the other. The brown scrubland adjacent to the 401 rushed past on either side. The bus droned.

Andy had pulled Stan up in the only direction he could, toward the driver. The washroom, of course, was in the rear. The long march back could not begin until they managed a complete about-face. Two children began to stare. A pale woman with a scarf over her head averted her eyes. A man in a plaid bush jacket clenched his jaw.

Unnecessarily, Stan looked into Andy's eyes and nodded. Okay, round two. Twisting and tugging Stan while propping him upright, plucking one leg, guiding the other, Andy waved his ass in all their neighbours' faces. Excuse me. Sorry. Just be a minute. Successfully reversed, all hands locked, Andy checked once behind his feet while Stan said, “Damn.”

Andy followed Stan's gaze to see the washroom's red
Occupied
sign light up. A preschool girl stood on her seat in yellow rubber boots and looked from the sealed door to Stan and Andy then back again. She wore a green dinosaur T-shirt. Eventually, her mother pulled her down.

“Just keep stretching.” Andy had his own knees slightly bent for the roll. While Stan's gaze never left the
Occupied
sign, Andy's alternated between it and the driver's wide mirror. Visorlike sunglasses. Walrus cheeks. Ginger moustache.

The intercom coughed awake. “I'm sorry, sir; there can be no riding in the aisles.”

Stan would have ignored him fifteen minutes ago. His feet were shifting too frequently. His eyes saw little. “C'mon. C'mon.”

“Sir, absolutely
no
riding in the aisles.”

Andy stopped looking forward. Land, brown and grey, rolled past.