The Push & the Pull (3 page)

Now, alone in the house, she showered but purposely didn't shave her legs. Time for a think. Hair in a towel, a second mug of tea in her hands, she wandered through the rooms of the 1920s four-on-four-style house. Nice house, nicely cut, but neglected. Acres of hardwood floor. Eight-inch baseboards. Five-inch moulding and corner caps around every door. But the bare walls needed fresh paint and some pictures. The fossilized lighting consisted of a combination of perfunctory overheads (with unoriginal shades) or unfashionably aged lamps seemingly designed to illuminate a minimum amount of space while hiding the remainder of a tired old room in shadow or half-light. He had already tried to explain his renovational siege on the ground-floor washroom, had apologized for the half-open wall. Frankly, she didn't care. As her mom's joke went, she was looking for human texture, not architecture.

The walls were tremendously bare. Save for a large reproduction of what looked like an antique prison blueprint on one ground-floor wall, the house lacked paintings or prints. The few framed photographs that hung on the walls were old, black-and-white wedding pictures and
childhood photos from half a century ago, probably Andrew's grandparents. And they were all tucked away on half-walls and behind corners, available if you wanted to see them but never dominating a room. Upstairs she found a black-and-white graduation photo of what must have been the legendary Stan. Some kind of pioneer hair gel sculpted his hair into unmoving waves. Contrary to Andrew's descriptions of his ailing father, this smiling, late-sixties graduate looked like any old dad. Well, maybe the smile was a little lopsided, one lip barely rising. And there was some asymmetry in the eyes. Only by leaning closer to stare at his eyes did Betty see the ghost of another, absent picture frame hanging beneath this one. Moving back and forth in the bright morning sunlight, she was able to see a rectangle of less faded paint suspended on the wall like an uncrooked version of Malevich's painting
White on White
. At some point, a photo had been taken down. Mysteries and minimalism: the beginning of any romance.

In their courageous and carnal first week, she had given and received thorough orifice tours, and yet she didn't know who was (and was not) in these few photos on his walls. Well, maybe we fall in love out of time anyway. Your parents and mine are in this house and they are not. We're together in something; let's let it grow.

His bedroom had a few posters, but room after room, floor after floor, just paint, and almost all of it in need of redoing. No, wait, above his desk was a small rectangular frame. From halfway across the room she recognized the distinct shape of a personal cheque within the frame. Because she didn't recognize the name
Gamlin
, Betty noticed everything else before concluding that Patricia Gamlin was once Pat Day, his mother. Twenty-one hundred dollars on his twenty-first birthday. Given but not accepted. The framed cheque was uncashed.

In the bottom left corner of the cheque, mirroring her elegant signature at bottom right, his mother had written
Hatred is a burden
in the same graceful hand. Betty had to wait all day and well into the night before she found Andrew sitting again at this desk. She walked over, wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, nodded at the framed cheque and asked, “Anything you want to tell me?”

Surrender to the ride's pain. Graft your breath to the pain. Indissoluble from every endurance sport, synonymous with the very word
endurance
, is one fundamental command — breathe pain. Make the pain your breath. Stretch your lungs with pain. Betty, an occasional practitioner of yoga, once gave Andrew a yogic prescription for “nowness.” “Your body is the past; your mind is the future. Your breath unites them in the present.”

Now, every aching moment of now, his bike trip is a debate of pain. Any desire must now win approval from the legs. To want is to sweat.

Any desire is a weight. A small bag of fine white powder. The well-folded map. A contraband novel, that decadent slab of unnourishing, non-warming mass, squats with its corrupt weight in the front right pannier. A second novel would've been dead weight, fire fuel long ago. Worse, Betty's twenty-seven European postcards may not be able to stow away much longer from the priorities of cycling. Each towering hill asks three questions of everything he carries: Water? Food? Warmth? Only the worst hills make him doubt his jar of Nutella.

And what's this? Irregularity, the ultimate vegetarian affront. After days in the saddle, he resents the gluey oatmeal's cling to the inside of the compact pot-cum-bowl. Easily thirty millilitres unused. Mountain Equipment Co-op's got to offer a little camper's rubber spatula. Wouldn't take much space. Just a few grams. Make it a fin on the back of a fork or knife.

The more he eats, the less he hauls. Magic gut: just add endless climbing and five grams of oatmeal will disappear. Dehydrated soups, vedge chili, peanut butter he transferred to a zip-lock bag. If only he could get decent cheese. And wine. Betty's right; France, it should've been.
Rouge ou blanc chaque jour
. We could have travelled together and stayed together. Maybe.

Behind him in Halifax is an MA he started in part to maintain ownership of the Kingston house that hangs, distantly, in front of
him. His father's house. His mother's ex-house. The house his father did not want him to keep. The Andrew-and-Betty house. Study in Halifax to keep a house in Kingston. Betty did notice the twelve hundred kilometres separating house and MA. “Grad school,” she said more than once, “snooze button on the alarm clock of life.”

Now he hauls one bag on top of another. Jersey pockets, saddlebags, panniers. Bag, bag, bag. Oatmeal in the pannier's top inner pocket, knife in a long jersey pocket, emergency blanket in the bag beneath his saddle. Hydration sack lashed to the rear. Packing and unpacking each night, he's begun to think in three dimensions. The snug grenade of the stove rides behind his right foot. At back left, the mess kit brawls for all space. Clothing — fluid, co-operative, sometimes another wrapped defence against rain — is spread all round, tarped here, wound there. Four condoms, those coins of freedom, entrance tokens to the land of just in case, shuffle around the waterproof matches in a pocket. The things he carries.

Thanks to condoms, he isn't carrying home any surprises to Betty. That is, if he ever sees her again. The Kingston house he's biking to may no longer really be a home, and Betty may not even fly back from her European Grand Tour. They've been apart eight months now, as much his fault as hers, if not more, and yet he still hopes hers hasn't been a Grand Tour of hooded European cock. Dropping E on Ibiza or sunning topless on the Canary Islands, strangers handing her drinks. Please have used a condom.

Sexually transmitted diseases are a contemporary version of the ancient Greek gods, although they cackle and scheme atop a shorter Mount Olympus. Sure-footed Chlamydia wanders on her rocky shore. Lame Gonorrhea stirs in his dark cave. Herpes on winged sandals doth fly. At least it isn't flying to Kingston.

Habitually, Andrew still thinks of the twice-contested Kingston house as their home, his and Betty's, not his and Stan's — certainly not his parents' — even though that house became too constraining for Betty and too heavy for him. The things he carries.

Think of the knife. Clipping in after breakfast, wobbling up to highway speed, he flicks the chrome pig's tail of the corkscrew open and shut, open and shut as he rides, wondering who thought to thread a removable eyeglasses screwdriver here into its centre. Who stared
up the empty helix and saw millimetres of unused space? Two nights ago, when he sawed most of the handle off his toothbrush to shed a few grams, he wanted to know who invented dental floss. Who saw that contested space and thought of how to reach it?

Barking flies through the air like a fist. Given time, man on bike will outrun a dog. Given how?

Two o'clock, gaining, as tall as a pony. Black and tan fur streaming back from bared teeth, from chomping bark. Down, down, down on the pedals, Andrew is up, standing, pumping, all but leaping from the cage of the frame. Time must become maximum distance. He must spin out his road more quickly than the dog devours his lawn.

Acceleration is easier on four legs. Sans panniers, transported to the Prairie, Andrew could crank up to fifty-five, fifty-seven kilometres an hour on the flats. But not quickly. And never four-belly pregnant, panniers swollen with gear. Legs, legs up and down past side dog, ditch-in-one-leap dog, just-ahead-of-gravel dog.

The human skeleton is bipedal, allowing us to walk upright, freeing our hands and prompting us to see the world more than we smell it. A bicycle de-evolves the body, collapsing the straight angle of torso and thighs into the acutely angled hips of a quadruped. The multiple vertices of a bicycle frame fold your hips and force you to mime your hunting-gathering ancestors. On a bike, you pedal out of the biped.

Saved by a rare stretch of flat Maritime road, he has time enough to regard the dog as another stamp in his passport, another border in car country. Between cities, Halifax cast off behind him and Truro hanging in the distance, he has biked beyond confined dogs. In rural Nova Scotia, few people expect (or tolerate) a pedestrian, let alone a half-breed, someone on a vehicle not in one, someone earning his own speed. In the country, many dogs are left unchained, too slow for cars but fast enough for anyone who steps onto their property. Several touring sites recommend a canister of pepper spray strung off the handlebars or a length of wooden dowel lashed to the top tube.

Without the first barks he'd have been nabbed, teeth into a bare, stubbly calf.
Canis familiaris.
No wolf, no predator, would bark then charge.
Here I am. Danger on your right
. Dogs bark for people, not themselves. We wanted them to scare from a distance. We wanted loud terror, and we got it.

Week after week, Stan would leave a nearly identical version of the same list of errands on the kitchen counter for Andrew. Groceries. The dry cleaners. A utility bill to be paid. Stan's disease itself, his quarterly losses, his trajectory of despair, was recorded on those lists, deprivation and need written out shakily on the backs of used envelopes. Finally, after months of little change, the seismogram of these lists would record new tremors of disease.

Andrew had to track Stan down in the house to clarify an unprecedented request.

“That's right, a leg bag,” Stan confirmed.

“We're talking piss luggage here, yes?”

“It's about time.”

Andrew didn't need to look at the jaundiced plastic juice pitcher beside Stan's bed or recall the radius of stains on the bathroom tiles he had washed two days ago for this to seem like a good idea.

“And where, pray tell, would I look for such a gem, better Samsonite dealers everywhere? Boutiques for the executive on the go?”

“The White Staff on Bagot.”

Driving downtown, Andrew wondered why they had waited so long. Why, he asked the radio, the dashboard and four red lights, had they endured curious, piteous and even disdainful looks in public washrooms as he guided a moaning, horse-eyed Stan. Why, he wanted the sliding pharmacy doors to tell him, had they been damned by stairwells and hastily used car doors for inadequate cover, with no discussion of alternatives? Why? Why?

“Size?” the pharmacy clerk immediately asked.

A condom catheter would roll over the penis to feed a hose that travelled down the leg. A vinyl bag would be secured to the inside of the ankle with elastic straps and plastic clips. Mute packaging and large print assured Andrew that Sur-Way Valves™ and Quick-Clip Clamps™ would allow drainage with or without removal from the
ankle. The clerk hovered about while Andrew read, as if he himself couldn't distinguish large or medium from senior. That or perhaps the Clear and Away™ was a known crowd-pleaser on the gag shoplifting circuit. Either way, Andrew didn't like being scrutinized as he contemplated manageable capacities, sterilization options and recommended adhesives. His concentration slipped from the mental image of Stan's tired old scrotum and pole to the clerk's rectangular black shoes, from his
Steven
name tag to the urine assembly line.

“I'll need to borrow a phone,” he said. Walking up an aisle, though, he realized this wasn't true. What would calling Stan do? Fling awkward words between them when Andrew already knew the lay of the paternal land. No, sizing up his father was better than asking his father to size himself up. “Wait. Just give me a minute here.” He'd probably miss the phone anyway.

A small August wedding was The Bag's baptism of fire. Paul Tucker, Stan's old friend and fellow teacher, and now his boss's boss at Correctional Services Canada, was remarrying in a yacht club. Ever an attraction, Stan and Andrew stood out even more in the small, well-dressed crowd. Andrew bolted his beer quickly at the start of the reception to chase a buzz that wouldn't threaten his chauffeur's duties at its close. He built two plates at the buffet, joked in line with young moms about eating for two. The thick brownie really was managed best if he simply held it up for Stan's periodic chomp. Feeding accomplished, Andrew helped Stan to his walker and guided him to a panoramic corner before nipping off for a pee himself. Three men shared the washroom with Andrew.

“Quite a job,” one consoled, vigorously wiping his hands with numerous paper towels. Andrew pressed his toes deeper into his shoes and pictured a long row of bar shots, then saw car keys and Stan's walker chucked into the sloshing lake.

Returning to his dad, to reality, he found Stan grinning like a pea-shooter champ. “Okay, big boy, ante up.”

“You just missed a Samaritan offering his services,” Stan said. “Nice guy, stepped out of the crowd to check on me while you were gone, but he'd caught me midstream. I could barely utter a word. My eyelids must have been fluttering.” Stan went on to make astronaut jokes and request another beer.