The Push & the Pull (13 page)

“He should try yoga,” Susan once replied, hoisting Stan's arms into the air. “It shows you who's lazy. ‘Raise a leg,' you say, and most people never give it a chance. You can coax, demonstrate, give them visualizations and still most people treat raising a leg like an intermediate step, not an end in itself.” She tried to let Stan's arm drop to show him
how little he was raising it himself, how body must first be mind, but he was already palpably proud of his reply.

“You should try teaching,” Stan said.

After twenty-four years of teaching at most levels — elementary during his own education, secondary by choice, peers at workshops, adults in or outside of prison — Stan knew a good class had ten to twenty per cent of its population willing to really do the work, to leap and then keep going, to change. Most want to coast, with or without your permission, with excuses or hostility. I'm here, but don't expect me to change.

Throw acne and hand-held electronics at the Allenville inmates, release barely dressed girls among them, and they'd be ordinary students: lazy, some version of cowardly and resentful of their own who wanted out.

Trained for work inside a prison by various men in acrylic sweaters, Stan was repeatedly warned that he would certainly be — each of them would certainly be — approached to mule.
Help a guy out.
Or
I'm protecting someone
. Or
Everyone needs favours.
Or
This letter's for my girlfriend, but they'll send it to my wife just to fuck me
.

“That's how it'll start,” Stan was warned repeatedly. “They pretend they need you, that you're doing them a favour. Carry anything, I mean
anything
, in or out, and you're breaking our rules for them. Friday's favour becomes Monday's job threat. They pretend you're helping them and then they start to squeeze. The only game you can play is a zero-weakness game. Never, ever give them an inch.”

The mule requests came as described. Stan's dragging left foot kicked up pleas like dust. Letters, small packages, sealed cassette cases. But the threat didn't come disguised as a favour.

Their sex was only partially verbal.
My dirty
this and
give me your
that. Whereas their arguments were almost exclusively verbal. Now, in memory, language pushes at him. Old taunts. Guilty admissions. Language pushes at him, pushes him on, pushes him down, while sex pulls at his balance. Here on every day of the ride at least one of their winter arguments between travel and study finds him, strafing him in the middle of a valley, adding weight to his climb or scorching his tent at night.

The Argument of Desire

“Of course I want to travel. With you. But I want to be ready to make the most of it,” he said.

“If you wanted to travel with me, you would.”

Their debate — travel versus grad school, change with a knapsack or change with a book — has mapped itself onto his daily debate of whether to remain on the bike-hostile Trans-Canada Highway (the hit-and-run way) or to strike out for the half-finished Trans Canada Trail, that carless utopia, that flatter club that would gladly have him as a member. Back in Nova Scotia, the Trans Canada Trail was off-puttingly intermittent, bursts of trail here and there that would require inefficient side trips and connecting jaunts. But here in New Brunswick, the trail lengthens, calling to him with its sweet, carless music. Here, and into Quebec, most of this patchwork trail has been converted from old rail lines. These old railways should be a dream, yesterday's explosions and rock-breaking leaving him a blessedly flat four per cent grade. On the highway, he's currently taking hills at seven, nine, or even an eleven per cent grade. When he'd first begun cycling and heard others speak of percentage grades for hills, he ignorantly assumed that a hundred per cent grade would be a vertical wall of asphalt. Oh no. Mark had eventually explained to him
that a forty-five-degree hill, already impassable by car or bike, was a hundred per cent grade. Road grade is calculated by dividing the rise (height increase) by the run (horizontal distance). If he migrated to the Trans Canada Trail, his rises would be flattened into his run.

He's tempted by the trail's reliable grade, not just its ease, and also by its steadiness. His lungs could find their own rhythm. He'd feel his pounding heart as all friend and no enemy. On a trail, he could let his mind go even more, fling it to the day's kilometres. He could be like the somnambulant minivan driver or the robotic commuter. All of that release would spare him the raven corpses of blown truck tires and the foul wind of engines,
and
he'd be faster, do better as tortoise than hare. But for now he's come to want the hills. This way he takes the land into his body. And for every up, there is a down. Where would we be, as individuals or as a species, without our masochism?

To get back home, to get back to his home, he needs an up for every down.

The Argument of Honesty

“If this is so important, why not do it in a way that counts?” he asked Betty, somewhat genuinely and somewhat snidely.

“Why travel for a hobby when soon we might be able to travel professionally? I want to do more than just run away.”

After the divorce, Stan rarely saw full-length mirrors. The cheval mirror that had been his wedding gift to Pat left with her at his quiet insistence and went unreplaced by both negligence and design. After forty, he only caught his full-length reflection in a random encounter at a friend's house or semi-annually in the crash-victim's dance hall mirror of an occupational therapy clinic. The feeling of deflating horror got worse each time. When Stan watched an eighteen-year-old Andrew begrudgingly, then intriguingly, slide into the suit jackets that he had bought for himself in his mid-twenties, he was secretly proud to see a little slack hang on his son's shoulders, to see that Andrew still had some space to fill. Teaching Andrew to wear a suit properly, Stan had asked him to point out the widest part of a man's body.

“The shoulders,” Andrew said immediately, not pointing anywhere.

“Where? And I said
point
to the widest part, not grunt about it.” Andrew glared and slapped the tops of his shoulders with one hand, one shoulder then the other, a huffy self-knighting. For a moment there was no disease, just a teenaged son and a father in his late forties sharing their universal looks.
I already know everything, so don't dare try to teach me
, said Andrew's set jaw, compressed lips and upthrust chin.
You know you're an asshole
, Stan's eyes calmly replied.

“You're relying on what you think you know, instead of actually looking. The widest part of a man's body, a normal man's body, is just below the ball of the shoulder, muscle not bone.”

They had traded those half-looks in the half-length mirror above Stan's bedroom dresser, and then a month later Stan had found himself once again in a hospital's occupational therapy clinic, staring into a wall of mirrors. Just shy of fifty, Stan already had the frustrated sexuality of a prostate cancer sufferer ten or fifteen years his senior. Stan stared into the wall of mirrors, alternating between horror at
his body and the burning knowledge that at several dance schools around town, flexible young women in tight clothing were staring into mirrors exactly like the one in front of him. Unlike these fantasy ballerinas, Stan's legs
did
quit, and far too often.

Worse than the bowed shoulders (his once-broad shoulders curled into an elderly woman's osteoporotic clutch) and the crimped limbs was his defecting torso. The deep ruin of Stan's body was nowhere more evident than in his unevenly hanging ribs, their slosh from the left side of his body to the right. The ribs are the saloon doors of the body. Something had flown out of Stan's saloon in a rage and twisted the doors on its way out.

With teaching for Correctional Services, the mutinous ribs and half-functional arms were generally more asset than hindrance. Grease for every joke, extra gravitas for every lesson, the swing up from a visibly hard deal. Stan had worked for Corrections for eight years before being transferred to minimum security, settling first along the gradations of medium security, which washed up everything. Men in their forties, neither old nor young, trying to resign themselves to a long, boring path from prison to clerking in some bad TV store, walking to a small apartment and heating tinned soup while young bloods hoped that enrolling in classes, just enrolling, never actually doing any work, might reduce the demerits they racked up breaking jaws and fermenting ketchup. In there, inside, Stan cut a rug.

To film Stan doing his English Language Sentence Dance it would be best to use different angles of him in front of the same chalkboard, one dialogue track stretching over multiple shots with the muscle-bound pupils changing year in, year out.

“Everybody up on your feet,” Stan said to one hulking class after another. “If I can do this, so can you: you're the body crew. All right, put all your weight onto one foot. This is a verb. Say hello to the verb.” For years, Stan hadn't been able to raise the opposite foot off the ground and made do with a flexed knee and shifting shoulders. “
Verb
.
Verb
. Funny word, isn't it?”

Funnier still — side-splitting, whisky-pouring, vote-denying funny — was the fact that most of these less than monolingual bruisers who only used language to make excuses or leverage couldn't
recognize a verb for a day pass and a hooker, and yet they themselves were all verb. Whole lives of verbs. Verbs done to them, then by them. Verbs unavoidable, habitual, or delightful. Verbs by the mustachioed guy in the dirty red toque. Verbs by the guy who insisted on wearing a sleeveless shirt in November to flaunt the tattooed pillars of his arms.

“Verbs are action words. Your words,” he continued. “What's the action? What's the operation? All right, other foot. This is the subject. It causes or receives the action. It can be victim or perp. The doer, not the done.” Inside, they were all in a way station between doing and done. “Now, rock from one foot to the other.” Stan simply shifted shoulders and hips while in front of him several thousand pounds of muscle shifted from one leg to another. “Without a verb,” one foot, “and a subject,” the other, “you can't stand up. Got it? Verb. Subject. Verb. Subject. Action. Actor. Action. Actor.” There it was, the loudest pedagogical applause he could hope for in here: silence. Ten, twenty seconds without a joke, a snub, or a taunt, just piles of muscle dropping on one foot then another. “All right, take a seat. Now, let's get a basketball player up here and I'll show you the semicolon.”

In hindsight, he would see Nick Vickerson's sleeveless shirt in November as the mark of premeditation and the tip of a threatening iceberg. As class ended and the other students filed out, Nick and his bulging arms stayed back. He stopped at Stan's Spartan desk and removed an envelope from inside his abbreviated shirt. Staring down at the seated Stan, he tossed the letter into his open briefcase.

“You'll deliver that for me.” Nick jutted his chin at Stan. “Wouldn't want any
incomplete sentences
around here.” For punctuation, Nick flared the uppermost layer of muscle clamped on top of his swollen shoulders and arms.

“Have a seat.” Stan nodded at the single chair bolted to the floor beside his desk. “Sit. For the details.”

Nick swung a leg over the chair and sat on it as if crushing a cat. Stan, meanwhile, was not idle. He had turned his own bent torso over to the desk's metal drawers. With his right hand he opened the drawer wide enough to dangle in his left pinkie. With his finger wedged in the metal drawer, he finally looked back into Nick's face, eye to angry eye.

“The next time you threaten someone,” Stan used the force of his
right arm and chest to shut and press the drawer against his skinny finger, “pick someone who feels pain.” Nick didn't move. “If you're going to start punching, be sure to land one on my head. We're insured at about thirty grand a pop, plus the LTD, and, frankly, I could use a nurse around the house.”

Nick seethed and twitched before spitting out, “Fucking cripple shit,” and hoisting himself out of chair and classroom.

Withdrawing his pinkie, Stan pressed it into the desktop to see if it was broken. His left knee withdrew from the panic button mounted on the inside of the desk's leg bay.

By the next day, Nick was out of the class. By the end of the week, so was Stan, suddenly “rotated” to the minimum security Allenville Transitional. It took him nine months and three applications under the Access to Information Act to find his friend Paul Tucker's signature on the bottom of his involuntary transfer order.

The next motorcycle isn't so friendly. The roar growing behind Andrew has enough insectile whine and a nearly instantaneous acceleration that he needn't check his mirror to confirm the approach of a motorcycle. Here comes the Cyclops' wink. Christ, he's flying.

The motorcycle approaches with such ballistic speed that as soon as Andrew recognizes the second helmet of a passenger in his mirror, the bike is suddenly behind him. At such a speed the motorbike should fly past him and leave the valley in seconds, and yet Andrew clearly hears the decelerating groans of low gears engaged at high revolution, of brakes and engine both working to slow down. Having swooped in on a scream, the motorbike drops its speed by eighty per cent to suddenly hang two bike lengths off Andrew's rear. The motorbike begins trailing him, hanging back just five metres.

Here at day's end, Andrew's long shadow almost touches the two-stroke stalker. The roar behind is inhumanly steady, an inescapable shawl snug on Andrew's shoulders. His tiny mirror duly records the rider's unchanging visor. Even their helmets are bigger.

Two kilometres, three, four. So, what, you've got a skinny fetish? Yes, you and your polluted heart are faster. Go ahead, give me your startling shout, insult my ass and get on with it. Obviously I can't sell you on self-propulsion, on the aerobic trance.