Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend

by Alan Cumyn

  He did notice once again that Shiels was in her yellow runners, that she was sweating from her exertions. He asked about her breathing.

  “Better,” she said. “I have to think about it, but when I do, I seem to be feeding myself more oxygen.”

  “ ‘Feed’ is a good word.” He did not seem to be in a hurry to open the door and get out of the chilly air. “Everybody thinks about fuel from food, but most of our energy actually comes from breathing. The better you breathe, the less food energy you need to burn. Show me how you run.” His hands were on his hips now. He stood like a coach, although he was old and it was hard to imagine him running anywhere for himself. “Just go up the block and come back. Pretend I’m not watching.”

  Shiels felt self-conscious about every footfall. She wasn’t very good, she knew that. She wasn’t Jocelyne Legault and never would be. But she tried to be sleek and smooth, to move quickly, to hold herself straight and land softly and pump her arms. She was out of breath before she turned around, so she tried to inhale deeply on her way back, to blow out hard. It didn’t work. She was pretending, trying to be some runner she was not.

  She stood gasping in front of Linton again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was terrible. I can do it better.”

  “Don’t fight gravity so much,” he said simply. “Watch.” He ran to the end of the block and back, and while he was running, he wasn’t old anymore. He seemed to move inevitably, like a freight train wheeling across the center of town. He covered the ground much more quickly than Shiels had, she felt sure of that, but he wasn’t breathing hard. His face was slightly flushed.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “Start by standing straight,” he said. “Engage your core. The same muscles you breathe with. Tuck in your chin a little bit. Lean forward slightly. Not from your waist, from your ankles.”

  Shiels tried to do it, but she stumbled forward instead.

  “What just happened?” Linton asked.

  “I don’t know. I was clumsy.”

  “When you leaned forward, gravity pulled you. Don’t pick yourself up and carry yourself along like you’re the dead weight of a refrigerator. Lean forward, cycle your legs easily, and keep yourself moving.” He demonstrated by running loosely, easily again, a few paces, as if he were about to fall over. Shiels tried and stubbed her toe on an uneven bit of concrete in the sidewalk.

  “Better!” he said. “You have to pick up your feet. But don’t overstride. Don’t reach with your legs and pull yourself along. Cycle your feet instead. Push back rather than reaching forward.”

  She tried it, she tried it, it was all very confusing. Running was so basic. How could she have been doing it wrong?

  “You’re going to have to think about it a lot, get it into your conscious mind, before the feel of it settles into your muscles,” Linton said. “But there’s no hurry. You’re young.”

  She tried again. Office worker types passed them on the sidewalk, looking at their gadgets, not interested at all in what they were doing.

  She was learning to breathe. Learning to run.

  Why didn’t they teach this in school?

  “We’ll add the arms in a moment,” Linton yelled after her as she ran. “How’s it feeling? Keep your stomach muscles engaged. Let the world pull you along.”

  She wasn’t so good at that, Shiels thought. She pulled and pulled a lot herself, but she wasn’t good at letting the world pull her.

  What did that even mean? Slap-slap, her feet hit the pavement. This was like being a baby again, learning everything from scratch.

  Why was everything so bloody difficult?

  • • •

  “Why aren’t you going to school, anyway?” Linton asked when they were inside again. The store was as still as a mausoleum—significantly less dusty than it had been yesterday before Shiels’s efforts, but Shiels still felt gripped with a certainty that no one would drop by that day to buy anything.

  “I’m not there in my head anymore,” she said. “So I’m taking a break. Figuring things out.”

  “Fair enough.” He disappeared into the back room. When he came out again some minutes later, he handed her a cup of coffee and sat down with his own on one of the ancient customer benches. He leaned back and looked out at the street. “Did somebody clean this window?” he asked.

  As Shiels told him about hiring the cleaner, he seemed to be viewing her with new admiration. She said, “Keep sprucing the place up, and more customers will come.”

  “Maybe,” he replied, the word laced with doubt. Then—“It is a great thing to have more light.”

  He seemed happy to sit still and watch. Nothing in particular was happening outside—a woman walked past pushing a stroller, a bus stopped and let off a couple who held hands briefly, then parted.

  “How did you learn all that stuff about breathing and running?” Shiels asked.

  Linton paused before answering. “I was a mildly talented runner when I was young, but serious, and I made it my business to learn as much as possible from the people around me. If you keep doing that for a long, long time, then eventually you learn about even basic things like breathing and running.”

  “What else don’t I know?” Shiels asked. It seemed a perfectly legitimate question, but it cracked him apart with laughter.

  “That’s lovely, lovely!” Tears shone on his cheeks. He spilled coffee onto his sleeve.

  “No. I mean it. What other basic things don’t I know? When you look at me, what do you see?”

  He brushed away the spilled coffee. “I see someone who needs to open up.”

  The coffee tasted musty. “How do I do that?”

  “Allow for the possibility, every day, with every breath if you can, that you might not know everything, that you might not be right, that you don’t have to be hard.”

  She didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. This man owned an underachieving little running-shoe shop. Who did he think he was?

  She took a deeper breath. “What do you mean ‘hard’?”

  “You walk around with a heavy shell on your back. Not just you, of course, we all do. But at some point you’ll grow tired and put it down. It takes so much energy carrying it around. Maybe that’s why you’re here, you grew tired of school and family and whatever makes up your own personal shell. You’re trying to put it down but you don’t know how. Just recognize how tired you are, trying to keep up the pretense of having everything under control. You don’t, of course not. Nobody does. Relax into yourself. Don’t be so hard.”

  It was easy to say. She felt something shift in her, difficult to know just what, but she felt like blurting, “I’m in love with a pterodactyl and we don’t even talk; it’s all physical, but it’s more than that. If anyone gets me to unload my shell, it’s him, but there is a stupid outside possibility my mother might be upside down over him too, and I don’t know where anything’s going, probably he’ll be shut away in jail if I don’t start organizing his defense. . . .”

  Instead she asked, “Do you have a family?” He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and there were no pictures on his walls of anyone other than presumably famous runners of the distant past. She didn’t know why she’d asked the question, just that she wanted to know.

  “I have a wife and two children, a boy and a girl,” he said. “Had. They were killed at a country crossroads at two o’clock in the afternoon by a drunk. He’d already lost his license. They were two and six, Don and Samantha. My wife was close to making the Olympic team in the 1500. She’d met the qualifying time in practice, and nationals were coming up. Every breath I take, I feel like I’m breathing for them, too.”

  Sunlight now was streaming through the window. He held his blue eyes on her unwaveringly—winter sky—and she did not feel like looking away. She didn’t know what to say.

  The door opened then—it was the woman with the stroller who had passed by earlier. “Do you have any broom hockey shoes?” she asked. “My husband’s company i
s doing this charity event, and suddenly I need broom hockey shoes.”

  Linton was on his feet in a moment. “What size do you need?”

  Seven. While Linton rooted through the back room, Shiels kneeled by the stroller and jiggled a colorful toy suspended above the baby’s head.

  Linton must have been decimated after that accident, she thought. How could someone recover from such a loss?

  “I don’t know how many times I’ve walked past this store,” the woman said, “but I had no idea what it was till today. What did you do, clean the window?”

  “Something like that,” Shiels said.

  • • •

  Linton served her noodle soup from a package at lunch, and they sat by the side window now, where the sun had moved. Only a few other customers had come in, but it all seemed usual to him. Shiels wondered if perhaps when life has done its worst, then nothing else can touch you.

  Or you become as brittle as an eggshell rolling in traffic.

  “Do you mind talking about it?” she asked him.

  “It was twenty-three years ago,” he said. “For a long time I felt like I couldn’t close my eyes. And then I could.”

  He didn’t look at her as he spoke. It was none of her business, in a way, but he had noticed her, taken her in. If they couldn’t talk about everything, then what was the point of being here?

  “How did you find out?” she asked.

  “I was at home, putting in fence posts because I was too cheap to hire a guy. I wanted to do it myself. Even though I didn’t know how. And Alison wanted to take the kids to the beach. I stayed home with the fence posts. It was blazing hot. I was digging down through shaley rocks that took a lot of pounding to cut through. I didn’t have the right digger. So I was going to go rent an auger, but I didn’t have the car. And they were late getting home. I just kept pounding bit by bit with the wrong tool till my hands were raw. Finally, I went inside for some water, and there was a message on the machine. The hospital was calling. So I dialed in. I remember standing by the phone, and then I wasn’t standing anymore, I was on the floor for some reason looking at my blistered hands, wishing I could feel them. Wishing I could feel anything, really. I was practically dead myself with the shock of it.”

  Somehow Linton had downed his entire bowl of noodle soup. Shiels had hardly touched hers.

  “It was a T-bone at a country crossroads. The drunk was going more than a hundred miles an hour.” Shiels could barely stand the intensity of his gaze, but she would not look away. He said, “She was a better driver than me. But I should have been at the wheel. I should have died with them.” He wiped his eyes.

  The front door opened—a customer came in, looked at them and said, “Does the number four go south when it gets to Cheasley, or north?”

  “North,” Linton said.

  When they were alone again, Shiels said, “My mother sometimes drives me nuts, and sometimes she says wise things. One thing she said to me not long ago was, ‘Just because a big wind blows, it doesn’t mean a tree is going to fall on your house.’ But sometimes, obviously, a tree does fall. It crushes everything. How . . . how do you survive that?”

  “You don’t,” Linton said. “Not really. You might still be standing, but you won’t be the same person. All of us . . . we all go through everything, pretty well. There are no shortcuts. But at some point you find yourself alone with a terrible beauty. I don’t know what to call it. But it’s naked, it’s alive, it’s all around us. The Brits have a word: gobsmacked. That’s how I feel sometimes.” He gazed off, then back at her in a piercing way. “This place might not seem like a sanctuary to you. But it is to me. From here I can look out my window, and every so often I come across some really remarkable person—she just walks right in here vibrating with life, and I think, Maybe I can help this person.”

  It was almost too much to bear, that gaze. “You have, Linton,” she said. “You have helped.”

  He got up, made a show of rearranging a small display of wrestling shoes.

  “Anyway,” he said, “after that big bloody wind, either you just keep hating the rest of your life, or you get on with it.”

  • • •

  On the run home, up the hill, Shiels tried to lean from her ankles, to hold her stomach firm, to breathe from her belly, pump her arms. Her stride got shorter and shorter. It didn’t feel easy, but she didn’t stop, she didn’t falter for lack of breath.

  The crows didn’t leave her alone. They flew high above her in increasing numbers, squawking amongst themselves some great news she wished she could understand. It was something about her, she thought—yet how could that be? How could crows know anything?

  Anything about her and Pyke?

  At Roseview and Vine, Jocelyne Legault now stood waiting for her. Were the crows behind that somehow? “Pretty good stride,” Jocelyne said when Shiels was close enough to hear.

  Was it? Or was Jocelyne just saying what Shiels was hoping to hear?

  “I need to see Pyke.” Jocelyne looked different somehow—bulky in her winter jacket, her shoulders broader, as if she’d been lifting weights for some reason, beefing up.

  Shiels asked if everything was all right. “I’ve been thinking about the legal defense,” she said. “Does your uncle need to—”

  “I just need to see Pyke,” Jocelyne said.

  They fell into stride together, walking. It wasn’t far to the house.

  “When’s the next court date?” Shiels asked.

  “My uncle has all the details.” Jocelyne’s voice seemed tight, as if she were holding back, trying not to say too much.

  “Jocelyne, what is it?”

  “I just need to see him,” the runner said.

  • • •

  In the kitchen, Shiels’s mother was making bouillabaisse, the smell of which filled the entire house. Cut-up sections of weird-looking fish filled a large cutting board, waiting to be boiled, and two lobsters sat, sullen and twitching in the sink, their claws bound shut with thick elastics. Oysters, tins and tins of them, were spread across the counter.

  “Jocelyne Legault is upstairs with Pyke,” Shiels said to her mother’s back. “She’s Pyke’s girlfriend. The one he really loves.”

  Shiels’s mother did not turn, but in the counter mirror Shiels saw that her nose . . . her nose had gone purple. Just like her own, and like Jocelyne’s.

  “What have you done, Mother?”

  “We need to feed him very, very well,” her mother said.

  “I mean your nose!”

  Shiels’s mother turned finally. “I’m just showing solidarity with his case.” Her hands were sticky from fish guts. “We are harboring him, after all.”

  “Is that all you’re doing?” From upstairs, Shiels thought she heard squawking, as if crows had somehow penetrated the house.

  “Yes. That is all,” she said calmly. “But clearly he affects me, too, maybe in some maternal way. I don’t think he has a mother. Certainly not nearby. I think he feels quite alone in this world. Now, you tell me, young lady, where did you go today? And don’t say school, because school called for you.”

  “I’m taking a break. I don’t expect you to understand. I work at a running-shoe shop.”

  Daughter and mother eyed each other across the fishy expanse of the kitchen. Steam from the bouillabaisse was beginning to fog the windows. Her mother looked ridiculous with a purple nose. But maybe . . . maybe no more ridiculous than did Shiels herself.

  Shiels fled to her room, her sanctuary, but there was no peace. Her window vibrated with crows trumpeting something from their perches, cloaking all the neighborhood trees. And just down the hall Jocelyne and Pyke were involved in . . . well, who knows what they were involved in? They seemed to be squawking themselves, the floor vibrating with whatever they were doing. Shiels imagined that if she took those few steps, the door might not open to her. She imagined that if it did . . . she would not like what she saw.

  How dare Jocelyne invite herself into Shiels’s own
home and then get up to whatever it was she was getting up to with Pyke? The old Jocelyne would never have . . . Well, none of this would’ve happened if she had simply remained a running champion. What was she turning into now?

  Shiels could not help herself. Her feet took her into the hallway, where Jonathan was standing outside the guest room door, ready to burst in himself. “What are they doing?” he asked.

  “Get out! Get out now!” Shiels screamed. There was so much baseball bat in her voice, the boy ran along the hall and downstairs.

  Fleeing to their mother, no doubt.

  Shiels burst through the door. It was freezing inside—the window was wide open. Outside, crows were dashing against themselves like paparazzi scrambling for a glimpse.

  Of Pyke and Jocelyne Legault.

  On the bed. And around the bed. And above the bed. And knocking into walls—a lampshade tilted crazily—and rolling on the floor, like two beasts wrapped in one covering, in Pyke’s wings. At first they were moving so fast, Shiels couldn’t tell exactly what was going on. Was he hurting her? Murdering her? Where did he stop and she begin?

  Jocelyne’s coat lay ripped open on the floor by Shiels’s feet; one torn pant leg dangled from the bed. Should Shiels try to pry them apart? How could she? She couldn’t even move. A crow suddenly broke into the room, flew around her head and exited.

  The interruption startled her into action. “Jocelyne!” she cried. She grabbed a pillow and swatted at the pair of them, as if they were bats loose in the bedroom. “Let her go! Let her go!” But there was nothing to grab—wings were everywhere, and sharp claws, Pyke’s beak, flashes of Jocelyne Legault’s white flesh against Pyke’s glistening purple hide.

  The pillow ripped, foam and feathers spilled out, and Shiels had to step back. What were they doing? What could she do? Why had she thought—

  Shiels backed up another step, then another. The roiling couple stayed still for a moment. She caught a glimpse of Jocelyne’s face, of her ecstasy, the flushed peace in the middle of what otherwise seemed to be mayhem.