The other girl stood up. She was tall, much taller than Joseph B. Hope, and slender. “I’m going to arise and be baptized, and have my sins washed away,” she announced, much as she might have announced her intention of going to the market. She made for the door, and Hope was reminded of her clumsy gait. Her left foot was in a special boot, one with a three-inch sole. Hope pursed his mouth, as if to spit out some slight bitterness.
The red girl was now clothed only in her undergarments, although Joseph hadn’t noticed her taking off her dress. It was possible, Hope thought, that the garment had simply blown away from her swelling body. “Yes!” shouted the red girl, and she bolted for the door as though it was somehow important that she precede the crippled girl through it. “Suffer naked children to come unto me!” sang the red girl, and Joseph Benton Hope said, “Actually …” and then fell silent. This was, after all, a Bible study, and he’d had half a mind to explain that the word “naked” was used in a metaphorical sense—maybe even half a mind to admit that the word wasn’t there in the first place, that it should be “little.” But the girls were already outside.
J. B. Hope moved to his window and looked out upon the streets of Lowell. Across from his house, beside the dark Merrimack, was a boot factory, and Joseph wondered whether it had manufactured the special boot for the crippled girl. (The crippled girl was soaking wet and still fully dressed, although she was struggling frantically to remove her clothes.)
Was it indeed possible, wondered Joseph Benton Hope, that the factory opposite made nothing save boots for crippled feet? (The red girl was now naked, her undergarments slipping to her ankles with the first touch of rain. The rain had mixed with her sweat, and the red girl was glistening.) J. B. Hope pondered, almost idly, how much of this he had wanted to happen. He’d certainly wanted to see the red girl denuded, but hadn’t the Lord already granted him that Vision? (Although, gazing at the red girl through the window, Joseph noted certain discrepancies. Her breasts, for example, were more ponderous, dragged toward her belly by gravity. Perhaps the Vision was of the girl in Heaven, where all is free of earthbound forces.) Hope felt no true desire to have amorous congress with the red girl, although he did have an erection. Hope touched it, shifted it to a more comfortable position. It was J. B. Hope’s theory that his penis was not engorged with blood, as so many thought, but rather with the Spirit of the Lord. Therefore, should he have amorous congress with the red girl, he would merely be placing the Spirit of the Lord directly inside her. (The crippled girl had finally torn off her dress, and she now stood sternly corseted despite her slender frame. The red girl was smiling toward the sky, and it hadn’t occurred to her that the crippled girl might require assistance.)
A church bell began to chime in the distance, and Joseph Hope absentmindedly counted along. When it reached nine he scowled, and with the tenth toll Hope rapped his tiny knuckles against the pane with annoyance. At any moment the crippled girl’s father would arrive in his buggy. (The red girl had helped the other after all, and now the crippled girl was bare-chested. For some reason the crippled girl turned away in order to pull down her bloomers, and Joseph saw a shallow and shadowed posterior emerge. She was naked now, except for her boots. The crippled girl spread her arms toward Heaven, the elbow joints bending awkwardly backward. The red girl pointed at the cripple’s boots and laughed.)
“Silly,” muttered Joseph, in reference to any number of things, not just the red girl’s adolescent scorn. Suddenly Joseph had desire so strong that it hurt, made him spit out air and fog the window. Joseph Benton Hope realized that his erection had vanished, the Spirit gone uselessly elsewhere. He also realized that he could hear the sound of horses’ hooves. Joseph Benton Hope wanted to go fishing.
Joseph spoke aloud, saying, “Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are buffeted, and have no common dwellingplace …”
Joseph Benton Hope decided to leave Lowell, Massachusetts.
The Hoper
Hope, Ontario, 1983
Wherein our Biographer acquires the Tool whereby he might practice the Art of the Angle.
Across from the Square were the shops of Hope. There was, among other things, Delanoy’s IGA, which would supply my grocery needs, not that I have many; a liquor store (where I hoped to open a charge account); two of the three taverns spotted the night before; a butcher’s shop, a bank, a bakery, and something called Edgar’s Bait, Tackle and Taxidermy.
Edgar’s display window was a strange thing to behold. A handwritten sign taped to the glass proclaimed LIVE WORMS, CRAWLERS, MINNOWS. The tackle portion of his trade was represented by an assortment of hooks and lures that appeared to have been flung in angrily. There were any number of stuffed fish, a stuffed skunk, and then, as if to show that he didn’t merely stuff trifles, there was a stuffed bear’s foot. Give me a bigger window, Edgar seemed to be saying, and boy you’d really see something! Edgar’s display window also inexplicably contained a violin, a dressmaker’s dummy and a Ouija board.
Inside the shop there was comparatively little. Almost all of Edgar’s stock seemed to be in the window. There were a few rods lined up along a wall, and there was a long counter with some books on it, scuzzy mimeographed things with cardboard covers, obviously written by and for the locals—What to Look Out For at Lookout Lake, by Lt. Col. Alan Skinner (ret’d), Hunting & Killing Grizzlies, by S. and L. McDiarmid and Fishing for Ol’ Mossback, by Gregory Opdycke.
Behind this counter stood Edgar.
Upon seeing Edgar I wondered why the shop wasn’t called Edgar’s Bait, Tackle, Taxidermy and Axe-murder. He was as evil-looking a man as I’ve ever seen, his head bald, his face covered by a prickly black beard. Edgar was also immense, a good half foot above six feet, muscled like a mountain. I guessed he was somewhere around forty-five years old, but the T-shirt he had on, several sizes too small for his chest and arms, bore the name of a popular heavy metal band. Edgar stared at me as if he meant to damn me to Hell. He removed something from his mouth, maybe the butt of a cigar, probably the leg of some cute forest-dwelling animal, and barked, “Yeah?”
I wanted to flee, but somehow I found the courage to tell him, “I need a Hoper.”
Edgar stared at me for several long moments. He appeared to process the information slowly, reflecting on each of my words. Then he reached down below the counter and produced the item in question.
A Hoper is about the size of a small finger, and a finger is what it looks like, to a certain degree. It’s carved out of wood and jointed twice where the knuckles would be. At the tip there is a large treble hook. This Hoper was painted a fleshy pink, spotted by big drops of red. It seemed as unlikely a lure as I could imagine, but Harv swore by the thing, so I asked, “How much?”
Edgar thought about that for a while and then said, somewhat arbitrarily, “Four bucks.”
“Oh,” I mumbled, “that’s a little dear.”
Edgar stared at me.
If I had my life to live over, I thought, I would say “expensive.” Never mind about screwing up my marriage to Elspeth, never mind about all the rotten things I’ve done to my friends and loved ones, just let me live my life over, and all I’ll change is I won’t say to Edgar, “That’s a little dear.”
Edgar said, finally, “The wife says that.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The wife says things are ‘a little dear.’ ” Edgar crossed his arms and placed his elbows on the counter. “So get this,” he said. “Last summer, we go visit her brother, ’s got a cottage up north near Sudbury. So we stop at one of those places along the highway, y’know, a restaurant like, to get something to eat. And the place is full of all sorts of gift shit. I swear, I don’t know what those people are thinking. I mean, after driving a couple of hours, I want a burger and a coffee. I do not want to buy a Ookpik, or a piece of wood with the Lord’s Prayer burned into it, or a placemat with a fucking Mountie on it, or nothing. I want a burger and a coffee. Anyways, see, they got these china animals i
n this place, little bunnies and stuff. And they got this china Bambi, right? Yea big.” Edgar spaced off three or four inches between his massive thumb and forefinger. “Frigging thing costs eight bucks. So I take this thing, this Bambi, over to the wife. Okay? And I says, ‘Hey, hon, you want to buy this Bambi? It costs eight bucks.’ ”
Edgar started to chuckle.
“Ha!” I realized what the point was and started chuckling myself.
Edgar looked suddenly crestfallen. “The dumb twat bought it.” He shook his head, world weary. “Didn’t say a word.” Edgar tried to forget about it. He dangled the odd lure in the air and demanded, “You want to buy the Hoper?”
“Does it work?”
Edgar answered, “So the story goes.”
The Willing Mind
Hope, Ontario, 1983
Wherein our Biographer, after suffering sundry Inconveniences, discovers an Establishment that is to his liking.
Not only did I purchase a Hoper, I also picked up a copy of Gregory Opdycke’s tome, Fishing for Ol’ Mossback. Edgar had told me all about this legendary Mossback in the half-hour or so I’d spent chatting (axe-murderers are people, too). Ol’ Mossback, according to local myth, is the premier denizen of Lookout Lake. Edgar told me that there are various schools of thought concerning Ol’ Mossback’s species. The most popular has it that he is a muskellunge, and this seems probable given his length, conservatively estimated at five and a half feet. Others think he is a mutant pike, and this notion appeals for its supernatural aspects, supernatural in the most literal sense, Ol’ Mossback having arrogantly overstepped Mother Nature’s bounds. There’s a few, Edgar confided, who think Ol’ Mossback is some sort of walleye pickerel. These are usually people who claim to have seen the beast, for they report that he has the strange metallic eyes of that breed, large and round, with a luminous aspect like those of a blind Buddhist monk.
Whatever he is, Ol’ Mossback is reported to be a monster, his body covered with scars, a record of his battles with mankind. He is adorned with fishhooks like jewelry. If anyone ever managed to land Ol’ Mossback (no one ever has, Edgar was quick to point out) the collection of terminal tackle stuck to the fish would supply one with the history of sport angling in North America; Ol’ Mossback is at least two hundred years old.
At this point in the tale I advised Edgar, “Get real.”
Edgar shrugged, but I could tell he was wounded in some small way.
“You don’t gotta believe me if you don’t wanna,” he muttered, and then Edgar went to an antique cash register and methodically rang in my purchases.
So there I stood on Joseph Avenue in downtown Hope, on a very hot summer’s day. I decided that what I needed to do was find a place to sit down and look at my new stuff. A bar, I thought, would do nicely.
The closest bar was called Duffy’s. It was also the nicest looking of the three town taverns. It appeared to occupy the bottom level of an old hotel, and the hotel was whitewashed and ornate with pillars, cornices and curlicues. The windows to Duffy’s were thick and stippled, but signs with fat, cartoony letters spelled out what you would find inside. BEER, one announced, and a drawing underneath showed how the beer came in big, frothy pitchers, and jagged lines all around it showed how it was icy cold. A larger sign read PINBALL, odd in this age of video. By far the largest sign read EXOTIC DANCERS. I decided I’d try Duffy’s. I was so taken with the notion of exotic dancers that I failed to notice the number of motorcycles that were lined up out front.
Before I go any further, I should make some mention of my appearance. I spent my childhood and adolescence as a fat and bespectacled lad, but during my twenties I’d started running and lifting weights in a frantic attempt to reverse the ravages of my life-style, so my thirtieth year found me with something vaguely resembling an athletic build. Sheer vanity had convinced me to abandon my spectacles for contact lenses, although they cost me a fortune because I lose them all the time. I now sport a beard, because I hate shaving, and I have long hair, because I can never be bothered to get it cut.
I was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and cowboy boots, which seemed somehow suitable attire, also a get-up of which Elspeth would never approve. (“Who are you supposed to be?” Elspeth would ask.) I was, furthermore, covered in dust from my moped journey, and my protective helmet was nestled in the crook of my arm.
So when I entered Duffy’s and found myself in the midst of a sizable collection of bikers, no one paid any particular attention to me. Still, I wasn’t so big a fool as to hang around. I turned, took a step, but someone grabbed my arm. A voice said, “Hiya, bud!”
The fellow who owned this voice, and was also grabbing my arm, sat at a tiny, round table. He was a fairly handsome young man, except that the skin around his eyes was prematurely wrinkled, and his teeth were bad, horrible in fact, two rows of misshapen, yellow stumps. “Have a sit-down, bud, and I’ll buy you some beers!”
Another thing you have to know about me is I’m usually near broke. The rest of the time I’m broke. “Oh. Thanks.” I tossed my helmet on the table (his was there already, one with a black visor, licks of flame painted on it) and sat down.
This fellow’s T-shirt read Fuck You. I tried to determine if I was missing something (these T-shirts usually make some attempt to be clever), but all it said was Fuck You.
The man reached forward and grabbed my knee, squeezing it hard. Then he lifted his other hand as if to slap me, but he kept it suspended in mid-air. After a long moment I realized that he wanted to give me a “high five,” so I lifted my hand and we slapped palms. Then he grabbed my hand, and we shook in that reversed manner. The guy said, “Geez, it’s good to see ya, bud.”
The waitress came over. The waitress was a plump, blonde girl with a red rose tattooed on her shoulder. She said “Hi,” in a friendly fashion and then pointed a finger at me. “Three draft, a salt shaker and a pickled egg, right?”
I said, “Sounds reasonable” (even though the pickled egg didn’t, particularly), and they both laughed.
As soon as the waitress left, my companion grabbed my knee again. His knuckles read L-O-V-E in fading purple ink. “So what you doin’, bud? I thought you lived in T.O.”
I know I’m going to seem a bit conceited here, but my first thought was that this guy knew who I was. My novel had been reviewed in most Canadian newspapers, usually accompanied by my photograph. I’d also done a number of television interviews and been on a game show. (Really, I was. It was a low-budget thing called “That’s A Sport,” and I’d distinguished myself by knowing absolutely nothing.) So I answered this fellow by saying, “Thought I’d do a little fishing,” and showed him my Hoper and Mossback manual.
“Just keep your dick in your pants,” the guy advised.
“I, um, intend to.”
My companion laughed, and I wondered why I apparently kept making jokes.
“What,” asked this guy, “did the old lady shoot you the boots?”
This lucky guess I attributed to my generally looking hard done by. “You got it,” I nodded.
“Oh, bud,” this fellow said, smiling and shaking his head. “Still fucking around, eh?”
It was only then that I noticed the capital B. Bud was my name.
Confirming this, the waitress set down three glasses of draft beer, a salt shaker and a pickled egg with a cheerful, “Here you go, Bud.”
I reached for some money, but the guy waved his hand at me. (The other hand, the knuckles reading H-A-T-E.) “I got it, Bud. I just want to see you do it.”
Oh-oh, I thought. I drained some beer into my mouth rapidly.
The waitress lingered by the table. She wanted to see me do it, too.
“Do it, do it,” urged my companion.
“First thing in the afternoon?” I bluffed.
“That’s why you do it,” the guy said. “First thing, so that all your daily nutritional needs are taken care of.”
“Eat the pickled egg, you mean?”
This was another of my bi
g jokes. The guy exploded with mirth. “ ‘Eat the pickled egg’ the guy says. Did you hear him, Rose? ‘Eat the pickled egg!’ ” Then he turned slightly more serious. “Quit fucking around, Bud. Do it.”
“It’s been a while,” I said. “Remind me.”
“What, have you been doing heavy-duty dope or what?” He was getting annoyed with me. “Fucking put salt on the egg, fucking drop it into the brew, and fucking chug the whole fucking thing!”
“Oh, that!” Bud was some strange goomba. Still, it hardly seemed like an impossible feat. I picked up the salt-shaker with flourish and gave the egg a dosing. I could tell when I’d salted it enough by looking at my companion’s face. When the egg was liberally covered he gave a little nod. I plopped the egg into the beer. There was a fair amount of fizzing. Then I raised the draft glass, said “Cheers,” and knocked it back.
The actual beer went down easily enough while the egg bounced against my teeth. When it was gone I opened my mouth wide and the pickled egg tumbled in. After a few seconds it joined the beer in my belly.
I thought I’d done wonderfully well, but my friend looked outraged. “You chewed,” he muttered, deeply betrayed.
“Bud doesn’t chew?”
He cocked his head, bewildered.
“Bud doesn’t chew,” I repeated evenly. “I was just shifting it around in my mouth so I could swallow it better.”
After a few moments the guy nodded, but he looked far from convinced. The waitress left with a quiet tsking of her tongue. I threw back the remaining beer and stood up. “See you around.”
The fellow nodded, unwilling to look me in the eye. “Sure, Bud. Anything you say.”
I got the hell out of there.
The next establishment was two or three storefronts down the street. It was called Moe’s Steakhouse and Tavern. Not my favorite sort of place, just your basic restaurant that happens to serve booze as well. The tables, seen through the large front windows, were made from plastic and lined out in a neat, orderly fashion. Moe’s place was nearly empty, the clientele being an old man seated at the formica counter drinking coffee, and two young girls at a table near the back smoking cigarettes and eating home-fries. Still, I decided to try Moe’s. For one thing, “Moe” is a name you can do business with, especially business of an alcoholic nature. I could imagine myself wandering in on a daily basis and saying, “Hey, Moe, what do you know?” “The regular, Moe!” “How about them Blue Jays, eh, Moe?” The other thing was, a stenciled sign informed me that a bottle of beer would cost ninety cents. A buck a beer (“Keep the dime, Moe!”), I could easily accommodate, even within my rather limited budget. So into Moe’s I went.
The Life of Hope Page 2
