The Push & the Pull (6 page)

“Sometimes we change our address to change who we are.”

With the miracle of ten dollars and three blocks they turned their coffee into wine, late-morning wine. Café, liquor store and the Wolfe Island ferry landing were just a few negligible blocks apart. On one of the ferry's secluded benches, he pushed the cork into a chilled bottle with a pen.

“When you come to a fork in the road,” he said, “take a boat.” All around them green land slid into dark blue water. Distant limestone crinkled in the sun.

September air pinkened their cheeks. Chilled rosé cooled each tongue. When they kissed, their lips were cool but their tongues were warm.

“Thanks for reminding me I can always just drink my problems away,” she said.

“Glug. Glug.”

Peering into the bottle she had half-raised to her lips, she asked, “Once we evict this wine, do you think I could live in here? Remind me to negotiate a Roommate Switch clause into my next lease.”

“Stay at my place tonight.”

“Ho ho, prowling the water hole.” She poked accusingly at his abdomen.

“Seriously.”

“No, wait, it gets worse. I'd already agreed to a weekend with my mom. Fucked out of one wrong room and dragged back to another. On Sunday night I step off the train, cross to a cab and say what?”

“149 Collingwood.”

“You're either nice or politely cunning, but don't you think I should have a little space right now?”

“Sure. Have two rooms. Have a floor. I have a whole house to myself. Only child, divorced parents, dead dad — lest you think I successfully e-trade in the off hours.”

“Oh. How long ago did your dad die?”

“August twelfth. A year ago, August twelfth.”

The water of an international lake sloshed along the sides of the ferry while its engine burned. Sounds both quaint and ugly drowned out his fading voice and his three-word lie. What difference did it make if Stan had died a month ago or a year and a month ago? Dead was dead. And Betty was alive. She kept her thigh pressed against his.

“You have a whole house and no roommates?”

“Not 'til Sunday.”

They were young and on a boat, travelling just a little on wine, a kiss and a lie.

It's so nice to wake up to the sound of
rain
! Closing his eyes to the grey morning light, he tries to burrow deeper into the sleeping bag. Maybe he can pry off the rain's charming patter, drift back to sleep on the rat-tat-tat before stepping into it. Sadly, he can already feel the dampness on his cheeks, recognizes that the sleeping bag rustles less in the damp air. The tent is swollen with greasy light. The novel, Mordecai Richler's
St. Urbain's Horseman
, could ease the pouring time if his stomach weren't vociferously empty.

Most long-distance riders actually favour one rain day. Wet but not cold, you can clip in and clock the kilometres with less risk of dehydration, less strain on the eyes, spare your knee and bottom lip from the frying sun. In your tent you'd be buggy in an hour. (Idle feet make quick work for the devil.) Out in the rain you can let everything drain into your legs, grab 150, 175, 200 k, as many as you can. Haunt the land when the eye of God grows cloudy.

Kneeling inside the tent, he steps into the full set of Lycra and nylon Russian dolls — shorts, tights, long-sleeved jersey, jacket, even the booties — and is sweating by the time he steps out into the drapes of cold rain. The nylon bag designed to keep water out of the rolled tent is fine if the tent goes in dry, but in the sopping here and now, he folds wet fixings into a wet burrito. More useless weight.

On the bike, each spinning tire becomes a centrifuge of rain. Planning for this trip back in Halifax, riding in the early evening, reading cycling blogs at night, he had fused his growing obsession with weight to his budget's dread of yet another new piece of bike gear and wilfully eschewed fenders. He'd come to touring cycling from mountain biking, where fenders, those clanking prophylactics, were unheard of — physically intrusive, easily clogged with wet leaves, and they denied you your sergeant's stripes of flung mud. But touring isn't mountain biking. He now rides on wide asphalt, not narrow mud,
and the first sixty seconds of today's soggy ride are enough to show him the simple merit of fenders.

Although his nylon overboots (the cyclist's thinner version of galoshes) wrap each ankle and shoe to protect the top of his feet from falling rain, they are open on the bottom to allow his metal cleats their bite into the pedals. The front tire's spinning blade of rain cuts steadily into the bottom of each shoe. His wet toes know he'd be better off in civilian shoes, free of the cleat's recessed groove. After the first hour, thin puddles have formed beneath the skin of his feet. Cold begins to chew on his wet toes. Up in the pillory of the handlebars, his sweat-breathing gloves saturate slowly but irreversibly.

Feeling the borders between his warm core and his cold extremities, he doesn't think of the concrete highway overpass growing in the distance as an evolutionary milestone until a leaning motorbike becomes visible at two hundred metres, then its reclining rider at one. An idle motorcyclist sits on the concrete embankment, sheltered from the rain and watching Andrew's approach.

Cars are alien. Their gratuitous speed. Their vulgar girth. The blindness. But the motorcyclist is in between, a wealthy cousin with better teeth. Licensed by the same seasons, given and taken by sunned asphalt, they too ride with a bit of fear clamped behind their rear molars. Their tires are also thin sleeves of air. Watch them closely, watch them from the reduced speed of a bicycle, and you'll observe their camaraderie, see them open their hands to trade small waves, or watch one stranger pull off the road to offer tools to another. Only here, beneath the veil of rain, does he see his edge on the biker. The rain that inconveniences me could kill you.

Andrew gulps cold water as hordes of raindrops slip past his collar. The marooned biker leans back on a concrete incline under the overpass, bulbous helmet and duellist's gloves resting beside him. Andrew must be a slow and boring parade as he limps along at twenty-seven kilometres an hour.

Trying not to stare up at the reclining motorcyclist, Andrew looks instead at the motorbike as he slogs one stroke after another. Their bodies mirror their bikes. Andrew's tires are a third of the width and depth, and he rides a single skeleton of metal not the motorcycle's triangulated frame of conjoined metal. Andrew's membranous layers
of Lycra are designed for warmth with the minimum thickness, while the other guy's layers of denim, leather and Kevlar pile protective thickness upon thickness. Andrew wears a skullcap helmet to the other's hydrocephalic dome, wears sunglasses to his face shield. And there's the engine — the herbivore of self-propulsion and the carnivore of a burning engine. Fixated on this shifting border of similarity and difference, staring at the motorbike but not at its rider, Andrew is surprised to hear him speak.

“Game of cards?” the idle rider calls out. “Smoke a hooey? You can't like riding in this.”

Andrew doesn't pedal two more strokes without admitting that he'd push the bike off a cliff to stop. Stepping from bike to concrete incline, shaking Richard's thick hand, he stretches out his sopping back on the filthy concrete. The bridge above protects them from rain but not dampness.

“What are we doing?” Andrew asks.

“Me, I understand. You guys are crazy,” Richard replies.

Andrew can smell his accumulated sweat. Can Richard?

“I may be slow,” Andrew replies, “but I'll finish with all my limbs.”

Then, with the flick of a lighter, they add another layer to the fug under the overpass and get high on pungent grass. They play cribbage on a little travel board Richard keeps in his bike's toolbox.
Skunk line,
Andrew thinks when another motorcyclist approaches, then passes in the pouring rain. If he ever steps onto the bike again, he'll ride from cribbage in the Maritimes to euchre in Ontario, jacks and queens and kings fluttering in his spokes.

Richard shakes his head at the other motorcyclist content to press on unsafely in the pouring rain. The passing whine of the other engine is still fading when he says, “There are only two types of riders: those who have been down, and those who are going down.”

With the marijuana loosening the vise of his trapezoids and relaxing his hamstrings, Andrew has his first moment of nostalgia for this trip. Thirsty for more than just water, thinking that a puff is great but that a puff and a pint would be heavenly, he thinks back four days ago to his private send-off in Halifax. After friends had wished him well the night before his departure, after the last of his apartment things had been mailed on ahead to Kingston, he shed his civilian
clothes, stepped into his shorts and jersey and began his trip across half a country by first crossing the city for a beer. Parking the loaded bike outside a brew pub, he tried not to be too self-conscious with his shaved legs, his bright jersey and the scrotum tray that is a pair of snug cycling shorts.

Once, in Kingston when Andrew was chauffeuring Stan, his father the English teacher taught him the difference between a traditional pint drawn off a hand-powered beer engine, and “the kind of machine piss you're drinking at student bars.” Stan had directed them to what he said “used to be a proper old fart's pub before it got trendy.” Andrew hauled Stan out of the car's passenger seat and guided him into a pub dimmed by stained glass and a contagion of dark wood running from the bar through the floorboards and into the tables and chairs.

Stan surprised him by saying, “The books I've read in here,” then directed them to a corner table to start his disquisition on hand-drawn beer.

“
Draft
means pull. Most of the so-called draft beer in this city, on this continent, is dispensed with compressed gas. Tell me, you little scholar, how can a gas pull?”

Around this same time, Andrew was learning to bike, to really bike, single track off-road trails, or twenty-five-kilometre road circuits out of the city. Mark, his unofficial cycling mentor, once slowed his pace on a road ride and deigned to go behind Andrew. “I'll ride in your draft for a change.” Andrew didn't tell his dad about all of Mark's lessons.

In the pub, Stan had ordered for the pair of them, then invited Andrew to watch as the waiter returned behind the bar to work the tall porcelain handle of a beer engine, filling their glasses with slow, even squirts of beer.

“See that? No gas, no electric regulators, just an arm and an ale.”

So that's exactly how Andrew began this bicycle odyssey, with a hand-pulled beer and the start of a question that had taken the four days since to crystallize. High, dirty and exhausted, staring from his self-propelled bike to the dozing motorbike, Andrew wonders if memory is pushed or pulled. Pushed at us unconsciously by forces and emotions we can't quite name, or pulled up consciously — obsessions,
worries and excuses ordered up from our private archives? Still more than a thousand kilometres from Kingston, Andrew recalls again that the English word
nostalgia
is derived from two Greek words: one for
homecoming
and one for
pain
.

Another time with a bike, when Andrew was a boy and being ungrateful as his mother attempted to teach him to ride, Stan tried to coach Andy verbally in the skill that Pat had spent a precious hour trying to do physically.

“Take it from me,” Stan had said, “on a bike, in life in general, you either push or get pulled.” Stan had been standing crookedly in an upstairs hallway of the family home, both his wife and his son sulking behind two different closed doors.

After his eventful September ferry ride with Betty, Andrew's clock was bent. Yes, it was Friday, but he'd been drunk, fooled around and then napped, all by four p.m. By nine, when he returned from the public library, the beer store and three trips to the hardware store, it already felt like Saturday morning. Saturday morning wasn't too early for the first email.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: post

(1) do you mind if I call you Bet?

(2) are you checking email at mumsie's?

andrew

Thankfully, he had a long list of renovations to keep him distracted while he waited for a reply. Speed the time with busywork. The undoing (fill, sand, paint) was dusty, tedious and entirely within Andrew's acquired skills. As for the pantry-cum-bathroom, beer and Zeppelin might get a wall down, but how would he make a new doorway?

His mother had called the main-floor washroom the straw that broke the camel's back, but Andrew had long ago decided a camel was far too large and stubborn an animal to symbolize his parents' marriage. More like the rotting acorn the chipmunk couldn't be bothered with, or the new litter unappealing to Mr. Meow-Mow. Still, at times he did agree with Pat's description of the ground floor's two pairs of adjacent rooms as “the shunting yard.” The kitchen and underused dining room sat opposite the living room and a perpetually dark entranceway incised by a wide staircase. For a few years he
had heard his mother refer to the ground-floor rooms as twinned or symmetrical. The finite grid of rooms was originally overlooked by a Pat enchanted with the house's coved ceilings, tall baseboards, endless hardwood and especially “that darling pantry.” Then both her voice and her diction soured. The paired ground-floor rooms became locked or constricted or, there it was, repressive.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: In Cephalonia

Perhaps we should see each other exclusively on ferries.

Greece would be a breeze.

Yes, Bet's fine.

Ciao

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Meet me on the highest passenger deck facing the sun. Travel lightly.