This All Happened

by Michael Winter

  Helmut asks Lydia to take the video camera, to catch them heading for the Narrows. He starts up the auxiliary outboard and spews forward, ducking under the boom. He describes a wide curve and returns to the dock, cutting power. Helmut leans to collect the camera, waves, then slips on the wet gunwale. He falls into the boat, hitting his head, and two of the crew come to assist him. But he’s up quickly and laughing and opens the outboard throttle, embarrassed.

  Iris jogging to Cabot Tower, to wave them off. Gulls sit with their chests against the pavement.

  They will sail to Boston on a dry run before heading to Brazil, where Iris will meet them.

  Boyd: You wouldnt catch me in one of those contraptions. He’s German, I say, as if that explains something.

  27 As I walk up Cabot Street a ten-year-old girl asks me to stop the ball. I stop it with my crutch. I look tough with the crutches swung over my shoulder. The neighbourhood so shoddy. A dog in a second-storey window, silently clawing at the inside glass. A man with an apron opens the door to a house adjacent to Leo’s Fish and Chips. He’s smoking. He goes back inside.

  Often I am afraid of new life. Of pushing into the new. Maisie says when you have a kid there’s an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month grocery bill. I watch Boyd Coady feeding a baby in the back seat of a Chevette, his seven-year-old standing beside him Boyd looks fiercely down Long’s Hill to the Narrows. Helmut in that storm last night. Lydia saying to Iris, He must be some loner to do that. And Iris: Helmut is looking for love. He’s mad at me.

  28 The caplin are sighted in Flatrock and Torbay. I have two five-gallon buckets in Jethro’s trunk. I pick up Lydia and Tinker Bumbo and we head north.

  There are men on the stone beach preparing cast nets and as evening falls they light three bonfires on the landwash and this will guide the fish in. There are wheelbarrows and buckets and families making it a picnic.

  The caplin will look like a force of bad weather. And they will strike fast and roll.

  The men wade in a little with their cast nets.

  The water is green and darker green and there are white boulders and kelp fanning in slow motion and I can see a flounder sitting passively in the green.

  The green pitches to black. It swarms black and darts like a vision behind the eyelid. About ten square feet of soft grey-black curve and then a slick of silver pins as the curve darts and separates around our feet like a beaded curtain. There’s no way to get them in a bucket.

  But in a few minutes a wave launches in full of their silver bellies. The bonfires light up their silver and they wriggle in the smooth wet sand and stone.

  The caplin crest and tumble on a high tide and we fill the two buckets in a minute. We watch children scooping up these frantic deaths into carts and dumping them into buckets. The rims of these buckets flicking and dying.

  29 We are in a Chinese restaurant ordering won ton soup, spring rolls. Lydia puts her hand on the belly of the teapot. It’s hot, she says. The restaurant is full, bathed in yellow spotlights. Lydia admits she assumed she’d be with a social animal. Her idea of a partner.

  This makes me wonder if Lydia is good for me. How her work requires her to be in the centre, where possibilities can grab her. The world notices her waiting and snaps her up to direct and act. Whereas I need the small, ignored corners of the earth, to write about them so that people won’t forget. Or even know for the first time.

  There’s a woman two tables down who looks like Lydia at forty-two. I could love that look.

  30 I am making lamb as the Moroccans might cook it. Lydia: Youre a good cook for a guy. But then, I’ve always gone out with good cooks. Usually, men dont waste time on salads.

  She says she’s been keeping tabs on her food and noticed a bunch of bananas and a jar of caviar went missing.

  Lydia, I dont know what to say. You think I’m sneaking stuff out of the house?

  She looks at my heel and says it’s full of blood. The bruise in my calf has sunk to my foot. I can’t forget that she has said she’s keeping tabs.

  You dont rave, do you, Gabe? Earl used to rave. But you know what? He’d shut up if you told him to.

  I want to say something about the tab, but this shuts me up. Lydia convinces me to drive her to Cape Spear to see the humpbacks. Warm and sunny. The whales are heading north. They loop up their dorsal fins five times, then arc and slink up their tails and dive deep. It’s as if their size grants them a different speed dimension to work in. All the movements appear in slow motion.

  One humpback heads straight for us in smooth torpedo form. The white of his flukes crimped over to the top black like a pie crust. A blast of spray from his spout. The spray drifts up and along the horizon, like an exhausted fireworks.

  July

  1 I grab another beer from Oliver’s fridge. Craig Regular is telling Alex that all new computers have a clipper chip installed so the CIA can backtrack into any computer and scan information stored there. His colleagues in Seattle have told him this. Also, if Quebec separates, the U.S. will invade.

  Alex is wearing plastic bracelets the colour of apple juice. People won’t go for bar codes on the wrist, she says. They’ll rebel at the objectifying of the body.

  Craig: But that’s not the same as a chip encoded with information. It’ll start with criminals. Then we’ll all be given a telephone number for life.

  Craig is working on a science-fiction television drama on the side. He doesnt care about story or character. He’s interested in creating moments of suspense. Learning how to do that. If you can do that, he says, there’s room for you in TV. It’s important, he says, for writers to watch TV. Craig says this with utter conviction, as a point of fact. There is something women like in an opinionated Buddhist. It doesnt matter the opinion. It’s the decisiveness. Men are not as attracted to it, especially in women.

  2 I’m at the Ship to join Max. Max is at the bar with Oliver. There are strong words and Oliver raises his glass of gin and tonic and pushes it into Max’s eye. Max recoils and swings. You can hear his knuckles on Oliver’s temple. He grabs Oliver in a headlock and hits him twice again with his left hand and Oliver slumps over his stool for a flash his dull face is towards me, his cheek on the stool, a string of saliva an extension of the chrome rod of the stool. Then he regains his feet and staggers past me to the door.

  Max: That’s one fucked-up man.

  Me: What did you say to him?

  Max: Nothing. It’s a musk I give off.

  Me: If Oliver wasn’t drinking he could level you.

  Yeah, but he’s always drinking. I was sticking up for Maisie and he went aboard me.

  Were you obnoxious?

  Max: I said to him, Oliver, you can’t say you didnt try.

  I order a pint. What you have to realize about Oliver, I say, is that he’s sensitive. If you challenge him on what he knows he gets defensive.

  Sensitive people, Max says, are the most insensitive of people. They are sensitive only to what hurts them.

  3 The phone rings, and I get out of bed to answer. It’s Alex Fleming.

  Gabe? I thought I was calling Max. But you’ll do. What do you know of Craig Regular?

  He’s thirty-eight, I say. He went to school with Earl Quigley. He’s a software analyst. He owns a house in the Battery

  I mean, what do you think of him?

  I think of a mean thing. Lydia says he’s not that funny.

  Alex: Yeah, he lacks a sense of humour. But he wants to see me.

  I really can’t advise you, Alex.

  Would you miss me if I started seeing him?

  That would just make it all more interesting.

  Craig has invited Alex to take a ferry along the south coast. White beaches and cliffs. And he thinks they should go as a team on the Exploits canoe trip.

  Good for you, Alex.

  In bed, Lydia sleepily: You were on that
phone too long. But later she curls into me, wanting me close. She will have no recollection of saying this.

  4 Why the interest in Craig Regular? Lydia: He’s new. In this town, everybody knows everyone else even if you havent met them. That explains Craig Regular.

  It’s true. I’ve never said more than five words to Craig, but I know all about him. He drinks Guinness. He doesnt smoke. Max said he has donated sperm to a lesbian friend who wanted a child, and Lydia says Earl told her there was some rumour Craig may have had a terminal illness and that’s why he went West and has been gone for six years and came back and dropped ten pounds and bought a place in the Battery.

  Lydia: People suspect he’s inherited some money. He likes to go on bird counts and is a vegetarian as well as Buddhist and I saw him once at a string quartet concert and I’ve also seen him at a film festival in Toronto and once, at Christmas, we passed on Gower Street late at night and we stopped and kissed without saying a word. That was after I broke up with Earl. Craig has a little cabin on the Salmonier Line and he used to design the student newspaper and Earl says in school he was a good goalie.

  Fact: I know everyone in this town even if I havent met them and they know everything about me, which is frustrating. So when someone new comes to town, or someone returns, like Craig Regular, everyone lurches towards him, especially the women, because it’s such a relief to meet someone you dont already know.

  5 How does a fight begin? It begins because of our contrary natures. It begins when Lydia arrives and says how things could be improved at the house I share with Iris. That the kitchen is poorly laid out, that we should move the shoes and jackets, that the red carpet collects dust, rip it up, that I should do something with the basement stairs.

  All these things are valid, but I’d prefer her to say, Look at the forsythia. Or, I saw something interesting today. Instead, she says, Talk to me. She demands to be told something. And so I’m mechanical. The phone rings and it’s for her, so I go upstairs. Then she starts in. That I left a communal atmosphere, that it’s up to me to return rather than for her to go upstairs. She leaves and does not tell me she’s leaving, so I hit the sack.

  She asks so many questions until I say, Yes, yes, and yes to your next five questions too.

  She has this gesture of pursing thumb and forefinger together, as though dabbing a watercolour and pointing out my flaws.

  She wants to be able to shout from different rooms. Whereas I dont find that civilized.

  Then she gets into the fact that I’m ungrateful, and that I’m a prick, and that I never apologize.

  She says she wants to break up.

  6 She has left me alone. Power always rests in the one who decides. So I feel our argument is incomplete. I’m restless. I decide to fish for urban trout. I bicycle down to Virginia River, fly rod tied to the crossbar. I choose a small wet fly. A branch of a pin cherry leans over the water, and I know there must be fish in a pool below it. I land two mad trout on two flicks. Both are the length of this book opened out. Seeing their white bellies and tanned sides wriggle on the hook, heavy, straining in the grass for water.

  I bike down to Maisie’s with the fish in a bag knotted to my belt. Maisie is looking thin. Lydia is there. And she smiles. I try to read the smile. The smile is considerate but weak. It’s not a polite smile, not a forced smile. It’s a loving smile, but a smile that says she’s fine with a separation. I sit with Wilf Jardine. He’s going to work on Hibernia in two weeks. His brother, who worked on the land rigs in Alberta, got them a package deal. Land rigs, Wilf says, are a cross between the military and slavery. Got to give good head to the foreman.

  I give this some thought.

  That’s just a figure of speech, he says.

  Wilf thinks my thought was a literal consideration. There’s a way to hold your face that will convey a not-serious consideration. I may have to learn this.

  Wilf says, If you want, I can get you work out there. The pay is outrageous.

  I tell him that I’m out of commission for a year. I make a wriggling motion with my fingers to indicate a keyboard.

  I show him my trout.

  Oh, theyre nice. Brook trout. How are you going to eat them?

  In rosemary and lemon, baked.

  Have you ever cured any? You take equal amounts of sugar and salt and mix it with dill. Press the fish for three days. Delicious.

  7 I was to meet Lydia at the Grapevine at nine. And she is sitting next to Craig with a Bloody Caesar.

  Lydia: I had to get someone else to buy it.

  Who? Craig.

  Youre going to make me jealous.

  Well, you werent here at nine.

  At one point, Craig’s hand reaches over her arm to make a point. Craig introduces me to his friends, This is Lydia Murphy’s lover.

  This pisses me off.

  I am worried. That Lydia will fall for him. The trip with Alex is off, Craig says. Alex is crazy. He is oblivious to my relationship with Alex. He is not circumspect. Near the pay phone I ask Lydia if I should be jealous. A little bit jealous, she says. I realize I had been relieved when I thought Craig was with Alex.

  Lydia wants to drive me home, but I decide to walk. Two days without Lydia make me want to take a third. She is getting up early to shoot a time-lapse of the sunrise and needs her rest. Craig has offered to be her trigger-puller for two hours. It is so ripe for her to sleep with Craig Regular tonight. He’s shirked off Alex and Lydia is tired of me. But all this will be said tomorrow. If anything happens if Lydia is shit-faced and they lunge and she doesnt even remember much but that she was drunk I will not remain with her. In fact, that’s the reason I decline her offer. I want to open the floor to her negotiation with Craig. To see if it will happen. Masochism is jealousy’s backside. How can I become unjealous?

  Cold fact: Lydia’s utter joy of Craig makes me realize how little she enjoys of me. She laps up Craig and isnt this what we want? To fully enjoy the other person’s being.

  I have left her to the wolves and her own lone-wolf desires. I walk up Long’s Hill feeling like a boring man. That I can’t entertain. I have this feeling badly.

  8 Craig uses the word ebullient. It isnt used with full confidence. But I can see Lydia with a man like that. She is massaging her breasts as she talks to him by the fridge. They are both concentrating on the conversation while I’m focused on their body language. Lydia is not aware that her hand is cupping each breast. Everyone catches an uncertain word and inappropriate gesture. Everyone has evolved to the point where nuance is a primitive knowledge. We all understand and are not blind to slippery characters.

  We are still planning the canoe trip. To go together. But of course Craig will be there. And so will Alex. I must decide to lighten up.

  9 Lydia is such a summer extrovert. And I am a cold and lonely. I left Lydia a delicate saffron poppy and a bowl of curried chicken thighs. She is having a smoke with Wilf and Craig on the lawn. I watch her slap Wilf Jardine’s knee and clasp Craig Regular’s arm.

  Wilf says he’s almost tempted to take a kayak down the Exploits. Just to witness what might happen with the six of ye.

  I call Max about planning the canoe trip. I tell him about feeling down. He puts Daphne on. Daphne laughs hard at my jealousy. She says she hears Lydia’s feelings for me. And that Lydia says good things. But theyre not as fun to repeat.

  Daphne tells a fine story and is quick with voicing her feelings. She is sensitive to slights, but she forgives easily. She loves a good dinner party, but also enjoys quiet time with a man. She, like Max, is at a point in her life where she prefers the rural over the urban. They will be spending time in Brigus.

  10 I buy eight empty salt-beef buckets at Murphy’s at the Cross. Lydia and I are in charge of breakfast and supper on the second day. We have curried chicken marinating. We pack our tent, food, and clothes in the salt-beef buckets and thread a rope throug
h the handles. We split the rims of the lids so theyre easy to pry off. We pick up Max’s red fibreglass canoe and two maple paddles. We are ready for the river.

  11 We drive six hours to the Millertown Junction. There are six of us in three canoes slipping into the river. Craig and Alex, Max and Daphne, Lydia and me.

  Craig and Alex capsize on the first rapids. Their canoe, submerged in water, is wrapped under a ledge of rock. We pry with two logs as levers. The canoe pops out of the current, bouncing back into shape.

  One moment: it’s night and we’re away from the three tents, at the shore where a tributary feeds into the river. A perfect Beothuk camping ground. I wouldnt have thought this if Max hadnt reminded me of the Beothuk. I had forgotten this was the heart of their land, where they built fences to force caribou through narrow gates to the water. The canoes are hauled up and earlier you could see the light of the sun through their hulls. We watched a beaver hard at work. Now it’s dark. And Lydia clenches a penlight in her mouth as she bends her knees in the water to rinse her new toothbrush. The penlight arcing a jittery circle of yellow light, illuminating stones in the water, her bare legs, her cheeks, and her hands. Earlier we are washing our hands in a bowl of soapy water and Lydia forgets, takes her Swiss Army knife and rinses it in the water. She cuts my finger across the knuckle with the blade. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so stupid please forgive me. It is the knife I gave her.

  12 Lydia’s father has warned us there’s a falls along the river, but it’s not marked on the map. Lydia and Daphne offer caution. Craig says we’ll do the next rapids and then set camp. Craig: If anyone gets wet, it’s better that it happens now than tomorrow morning.

  We shoot the rapids.

  Lydia and I in the lead canoe. Instructions: if any heavy rapids, pull to the side and inspect the river.

  We see high whitewater ahead and pull in.

  But Max and Daphne keep going.

  The third canoe follows – Craig and Alex shrugging. So we join them.

  But ahead I can tell Max is in trouble.