The Push & the Pull (20 page)

Near the entrance, the alienness of small, polite signs and cement and turnstiles is brushed aside by a physical dig for cash and a silent audition of various arguments for the ticket taker.
I believe this is called smelling the roses
. Or
I don't pollute. You let in the planet killers, but not me? Oh this? Seeing-eye bike
.

The turnstiles in front of him leave no hope of slipping the bike past. Drained as he is from fleeing the Mustang, could he even lift the bike over? Approaching the admission guy (guy — damn) he's still debating aloof expectancy versus some calibre of plea when he hears, “'ang on, let me get da gate for you.”

Stepping out of his booth to ease the bike's passage, the young clerk with his whispered moustache asks, “You come up the Temeese?”

“No, but I'm looking for it.”

“Right over dere.”

At the other end of the parking lot, a metre-wide trail reaches into the trees. Small square signs point to Le Petit Témis, a long section of Canada's incomplete Trans Canada Trail and a bit of cycling heaven. “Merci,” Andrew says, stepping inside the garden.

Incongruous with flower beds both ordered and sprawling, with patterned groves of saplings and cascades of shrubbery, are the ambitiously tall lampposts with their ballpark halogens and suspended speakers. Sealing the adjacent highway from sight, the botanical gardens try to replace its muffled roar with Vivaldi audible at every step. Andrew is delighted. Every violin stroke is like a wipe from a clean cloth. Bed after flower bed is even more compelling than the fragrant cafeteria. Laying the bike on the ground, he is combed by serrated leaves and showers in greenery. The complete spectrum of green, from the most sprightly bright greens to the most brooding and umbrous,
are punctuated by dissolutions of burgundy and brief frosts of blue. Flowers hang their various lanterns. Ladies dangle bright slippers. Around and around he goes.

Returning to the pavilion, he eats three tasteless bagels greased with slabs of dull cream cheese, drinks two bottles of grapefruit juice and reads photo panels devoted to the region's rail history.

Le Petit Témiscouata railway ran for one hundred and twenty-five kilometres, from Quebec's Rivière-du-Loup into the most westerly point of New Brunswick. Designed to connect New Brunswick's serpentine Saint John River to the massive St. Lawrence, up towering hills and through almost constant curves, Le Témis remained profitable after other private rail lines lost freight to trucks as nineteenth-century rail was replaced by twentieth-century trucking. Entire forests of lumber were hauled through this curved chute blasted through rock and cut through forest. In its day, Canada's national railway was the largest civil engineering project in the world. The world's second-largest country built a railway from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, then squandered it in favour of perpetually running diesel trucks, those warehouses on public roads. Some of the freight currently passing behind Andrew on the Trans-Canada Highway arrived in Halifax by ship to be trucked to warehouses in Montreal before being returned by truck to retailers in Halifax. The Trans-Can isn't a road; it's a river of oil.

Cut and cleared, then eventually abandoned, Le Petit Témis was finally reclaimed as part of the growing rail-to-trail initiative, that funereal dirge sounding across a continent content to rip up unused rail so every citizen can have the freedom to buy groceries with an eight-cylinder Supermarket Utility Vehicle. Linked once again, Le Témis has become a segment of the growing Trans Canada Trail.

Here, inside a public garden sealed from public view, at an intersection of highway and trail, Andrew digs out his half-novel to wait for night to fall completely. In this, the first in a series of hidden waits, he isn't able to bike away from memories good or bad. Betty's postcards continue to ride prominently on his bike, and sometimes her arguments ride even closer.

The Argument of Honesty, II

“Okay, sure, you want to travel with me to some degree,” said Betty. “But obviously, indisputably, you want something else more. I don't blame you for wanting tea and books in a cold apartment; I blame you for not admitting it.”

The ride has him eating constantly, with unprecedented nutritional demands but also an inconceivable nutritional licence. He could eat ice cream by the pound without gaining any. Eating alone, squirting twice-warmed but uncooked food into his mouth on the bike or packing himself in a restaurant, he often pictures Betty in one European restaurant or another. He doesn't yet know the monotonous, tepid reality of bread-and-cheese travelling in Europe, so to him she is eating risotto one day and miso-baked tofu the next.

Because the start of the trail runs vulnerably close to the highway, he waits for the cover of darkness, passing hours in the garden cafeteria reading, eating and strolling up to one informative display after another devoted to the now extinct railway. Rivière-du-Loup and Edmundston were, as rail enthusiasts call them,
the ends of steel
. Long after Andrew has read each display panel at least twice, he thinks as he eats of the nutritional museum exhibit he could create for his own culinary evolution, the cuisine he inherited giving way to one he chose.

The Kingston house that hangs in front of Andrew, waiting 850 kilometres beyond his handlebars, has finally relinquished its gendered kitchen appliances. Even when divorce turned the house into a men's club, neither Stan nor Andrew would ever have allied himself to antique phrases like
her kitchen
or
her oven
, and yet in ways, their kitchen fossilized at Pat's departure. No
Lady Convection
warmed their hearth, no
Kitchen Maid
housed their meals, but gender still lurked in their cupboards and haunted their drawers.

For the first few years after the divorce, emerging, finally, from numerous mediocre restaurants, Stan and Andrew cooked together, opening bags and cans, double-checking the instructions on the sides of small boxes. Aside from the day's barbecued or fried meat, they subsisted on the astronaut food of the early 1980s, with vegetables frozen into bricks or stacked into their canned pillars. A few years after Pat's
departure — Stan shrinking, Andrew growing — Andrew unearthed grey memories and dug out the already aging electric frying pan Pat had gladly abandoned. Freckled with pepper, pork chops were fried until they achieved the colour of lead. Sausages hissed and spat.

On her weekends with Andy, or in the phone calls he made to her, Pat quickly deflected any questions about cooking. She talked over him if necessary —
roux-
this,
parboil
-that — or bribed him off with more TV time or asked him to first grate the cheese she knew he'd silently snack on, anything but make him into Stan's butler, maid
and
chef.

At home, Andrew had no complaints. Back bacon sandwiches for dinner. Boil-in-the-bag corned beef. Frozen pizza. Mac 'n' cheese 'n' wieners again. Tucked there at the back of the house, the kitchen was their forgotten, Atlantic province. Stan relented to a microwave only after a VCR and a video game console had long ago made their way into the house. When Andrew was stretched on the rack of full adolescence, when their freezer was piled deep with frozen entrées he didn't then realize were made by a company that started its meat empire removing dead animals from farms, Andrew was unfazed when Heather, his first girlfriend, said, “You don't cook; you heat. Has this kitchen ever produced a salad?” Mouth and inner body slept a few more years.

He never did get to ask Betty's mother if architects and real-estate agents anticipate the architecture of argument. The kitchen and dining-room arguments about meat between Stan and a late-adolescent, quasi-vegetarian Andrew spread throughout the house. Triumphantly raising an arm off his bed during some home physio, Stan had the audacity to boast, “See? Protein,” as if their now contested meals of meat and two tasteless veggies were getting his weak arm up in the air, not exercise or Andrew's daily coaching.

“That's just it, though,” Andrew retorted, resisting Stan's raised arm. “North Americans consume twice as much protein as we can handle, let alone need. You think any other mammal needs a magazine to take a shit?” A week later, standing over a phone book in the front hall, they debated a pizza order.

“Ordering one vegetarian pizza won't infect you for life, Dad.”

“What other pleasures do I have?” Stan said, shuffling off. He wasn't thirty seconds before calling out, “Just order two.”

That spring, if he hadn't had to lift Stan off the toilet ten minutes before starting dinner four feet away, if he'd known more food than the meat, potato and one vedge of two decades ago, if he hadn't been greying meat in an electric frying pan, hadn't biked his way into a friendship with the vegetarian athlete Mark, he might not have gone fully vegetarian, might not have later fallen in love with Betty. But Stan's defecting ribs were still palpable in his hands after two washes in the kitchen sink when he dropped two pork chops into the pan. The sizzling, bloody meat aged steadily along its dagger of bone. A phlegmy nugget of fat bubbled in a notch at the bone's base. With a large fork he plucked up one chop half-cooked.

Years later, Betty and Andrew strolling home from an Indian restaurant, she once again took up their periodic inquiry into why they had fallen together so thoroughly and so quickly. “All right, look, I'm not asking for the number, but your lovers — how many, and how many were vedge? For me, any time a guy reached for a burger I knew this was just temporary sex, and not the best-tasting fuck in the world at that. The two of us haven't spent a month in church between us, and yet we know all about the challenges of interfaith marriage. A guy wants non-human ass in his mouth, and I cue the curtain.”

“Can't leave the tofu tribe.”

“This thing with your dad, you so easily could have been an asshole. I don't just mean scowling at him when he wanted a hand up the curb, though that was no doubt Option Number One. Outwardly, you could have been decent, maybe even good to him, but still let yourself be an asshole the rest of your life —
excused, entitled, exempt
. A taker. You chose to avoid that.”

“No, a saint I wasn't.”

“That story about the bus, that's nothing. We all lose our patience. A week with you and anyone could see what you haven't become. A lot of guys think foreplay is pushing your skull to their dick. A guy has to do a lot of work not to wind up an asshole. You helped. You cared. I can tell.”

“I did what had to be done, that's all.”

“You did more, and you should admit that. What, it's a coincidence his body was falling apart and you went vedge?”

Reaching home, they made a bowl of their pelvises, spilt milk worth crying over.

The cafeteria of the botanical gardens is about to close so he loads up before leaving. Sick of the tasteless bagels, he settles for multiple bananas, peanut butter and mildly bilious orange juice. Only when the clerk bends beneath the counter for another handful of peanut-butter packets does Andrew notice a pink highlighter jutting out of a Styrofoam cup beside the cash register. “Actually, could I get a few more?” By the time the clerk rises again with a double handful, the pink highlighter has leapt into one of Andrew's deep jersey pockets. “What about a spoon?”

Ostensibly racing or fleeing the Mustang crew, Andrew doesn't last more than an hour on the darkening cycling trail before he stops at a picnic table (oh, the civility) to dig out postcards, novel and highlighter.

Austria:

A,

If you're lugging any brain at all along with your pack, travel will make you a Marxist, though Groucho's your man, not Karl. Vienna is a conveyor belt. Starfucks on one side, DickFondles on the other. I want to see architecture. Instead I see fatties looking up from their guidebooks.

I hear rumours of an annual summer convention / competition for pickpockets. They choose a city, descend en masse, and pluck away. No wonder. Another day here and I'd pick my own pockets.

Heading to Turkey to skip class,

You Betcha

What, he only now wonders, is he doing on this ridiculous bike?

Prague,

Even I love Czech beer, you idiot.

That's a chandelier made of human bones. Very huge. Very thrilling. From an ossuary outside the city. S'posedly there's at least one of every bone in the human body. Short ones connected to the long ones.

What's that bike of yours made of?

—
Plan B

Here and now, riding what should be a cyclist's dream, an unhilly, carless trail of more than one hundred kilometres punctuated by hand pumps of potable water, he wants Betty more than he wants rolling speed and the aggregate pleasure of the kilometres rolling on by. Opening his half-novel and turning it sideways, he writes perpendicularly across the type with the pink highlighter.

YOU ARE

MY PUSH &

MY PULL

Conserving paper for fires yet bursting on with telegrammatic brevity, he flips onto the next pair of hinged pages and continues. In the moonlight he can just make out how the translucent fuchsia ink of the highlighter picks up random black letters from the novel, like stray iron filings plucked from the sand.

His cyclist's half-gloves could be the hand protection of a tombstone engraver. In this privately lapidary mode he is finally wise or honest or both.

MISS YOU

LIKE CRAZY.

LIVE W / ME.

Or I'll live with you. The bike is now a stockade. Clipping back in is punching at the cancerous factory, crewing up on the low-riding fishing boat. Something like 115 kilometres left to Rivière-du-Loup. Until now, his credit card has been useless mass, a precautionary
rectangle. He could book a flight at the nearest 'net café and ship the bike to K-town. Train to Montreal. Flight to Madrid. Clothes somehow, somewhere.