Two-Man Tent

by Robert Chafe

So that I’m lying through my teeth and saying yes. Yeah, sure baby. I’d love to. I’d love to have Raoul over for dinner.

  That day it rained in the morning so the streets were slick and slippery with that black grime, indescribable, unknown origin. On our way out for groceries, Joanne almost took a spill coming off the last step into the street, grabbed my arm, wrenched my back. An hour at the market and my back aching for real, I was feeling fucking old and too proud to say it, but eventually I had to give in and ask to take a break. We sat on a bench, the seat still wet and damp up through my shorts. Three old women sat huddled over a basket across the street. Their hands were firing so fast you could barely see what they were doing. Peeling garlic cloves. They have someone to do everything in this country, and people who will pay to have it done.

  Joanne was a born capitalist. She should have been content here, marvelling at the prices, the bulk available. If only she could have ignored the darker side of things: the large glass cases, the meat still on the bone, the tufts of fur at the edges. The meat could pass for goat or lamb if it wasn’t for that fur.

  “I hate this.”

  One deep-dive stare into her wet eyes and I knew it was about more than the dog meat or the day or her near spill on the stairs. Maybe things were moving slowly enough now that we were finally out and together and sitting down that she could lob the idea and trust that I’d catch it. She didn’t want to stay. She wanted to go back home.

  “I went into a bank machine the other night,” she said. “The locks fucked up, wouldn’t let me out. I ended up stuck for fifteen minutes. Motion sensor screaming all hell. There’s me banging on the glass trying to catch someone’s attention.”

  “It’s a sign. We should never have come.”

  “I’m being serious.” Her face was welling up red, with anger or more. I pulled her into me.

  Two little old men walked past us, pinkies locked, arms swinging. Joanne pulled away from me to watch them. This conservative country, but here in the city and in the middle of the day, men walking hand in hand, arms around each other. Joanne went to say something and stopped herself, turned to look at me instead.

  “My contract is for a year,” I said, and left it at that. She stared past her chin at the wet ground. She nodded then, her head heavy with a thought. I expected her to get up and walk away and keep walking, but she let herself lean into me. Her hair was long and loose and falling into the open neck of my shirt.

  That afternoon the classroom was dark, barely three o’clock but it was like dusk, and the kids were dopey and inattentive. The flicker of the fluorescent light and its unnatural insect hum. I was telling the kids a story about snowstorms, the whip of a good Newfoundland wind, the rocks along the shoreline and what it looked like when they were covered with snow and ice and the froth of the waves. White, I used the word a lot. I was asking the kids questions about winter, memories they had about snow. I spun the globe on my desk, watched the lines of latitude wobble and the pink blob of where I’d come from blur into the blue around it. I talked about geography and distance and how far away in the world people could be from each other.

  My phone buzzed in the middle of class and when I flipped it open it was Joanne checking in: Raoul coming @ 6 4 dinnr dont b late.

  Some of the kids routinely stayed behind, doing their best to tell stories with ideas far too complex for the basics I’d been teaching them. Their English was cute, words and phrases inverted and substituted. They called me fat, my first days on the job. Teacher fat, teacher need diet. They were nicer now. Some of them with their impossible notions of North America. Me with my flat-combed hair and pressed shirt. Teacher smart. One little girl, Ji-Hyun, that’s what she would say to me.

  Ji-Hyun was the last to leave again and as the door was falling closed behind her it was blocked by Min’s little face asking how I was doing. He had taken to dropping in after my classes to check my progress. His concern was a hold-over from the first weeks when the kids and chaos had sent me out of the building at the end of each day with my face red and splotchy. Min had advised “potions” at the time. It took me days to figure out that he might have been saying “patience.”

  “Thing ok?”

  His questions were kind enough, but I always felt two wrong answers from an early ticket home. I hadn’t been very good at the job, teaching kids. I knew it well enough, and it wouldn’t have been a great act of deduction for Min to put it together too. But I was getting better, the last month or so, that was true.

  “Friday, this. Fun tonight? You and wife, Joanne?”

  Min was only testing his English, making small talk, but I found myself telling him about Raoul coming for dinner and how I’d rather be shot than be there myself.

  I meant it to be funny, but it felt serious and confessional, Min technically being my boss. He threw out some words, rearranged them, did his best to ask if I didn’t like Raoul and I couldn’t help but blurt out the truth that I didn’t.

  I rolled the globe over and over again, making it rumble on its little plastic base. And then I did something weird and uncalled for. I told Min that Joanne and I weren’t married. I had no real reason to tell him, and it was stupid of me to do it. He could have had us on a plane the next day, but I saw right away that he wouldn’t.

  “But you are girlfriend?”

  “Yes, she is my girlfriend. We are together.”

  “This is good.”

  It was a statement, but I heard a question in there. He stared at me and confirmed that it was in fact a question. So I shrugged. And I don’t know why I did that. I don’t know why I shrugged, but I shrugged again.

  He looked almost pleased by this, ran his hand along the edge of the desk, kicked the side of his feet together. It was boyish and odd, a new version of him or something.

  “Is because Raoul is homosexual, that you not like?”

  It was his best stab at English yet. He was looking up at me, and the angle of his neck made me realize just how small he was. He had no trace of facial hair. I was still rolling the globe, this thin line of latitude from where I had come from on the other side of the planet to where I was now. Why did I hate Raoul so much?

  I apologized, though I wasn’t sure I had a reason to, and Min said that he had to leave. It was the way he said that, and the way that he didn’t move but stood there, his hand feeling the edge of the desk, that made me keep talking.

  “What do you think? Of homosexuals?” I asked him. I was tearing up then, like a baby. So embarrassed by it that I didn’t even wipe them away, let them sit heavy on my lids, hoped he wouldn’t notice.

  Min smiled, finally showed some teeth. He saw everything, didn’t he? Every deep dark secret pushing its way up? And thinking that, I walked closer to him. “I should go home,” I said. And then it was my turn to not move and stare. I started to unbutton my shirt.

  Min retreated and went to stand by the door, staring at the floor and I felt as fucking stupid as I’d ever felt. And panic, words to summon and explain myself, to apologize and to start begging for leniency and secrecy, to not be fired and thrown out of the fucking country. Jesus. My hands up, face in my palms. Fuck.

  The room was quiet and then there was movement again and when I looked Min was flicking the door lock. He turned off the lights, and made his way back across the room. The better part of me fell away through the cracks in the floorboards and there I was staring at what was left, the unfamiliar chunk of myself that was locked in there with him.

  In the intervening hours, darkness had set in for real, the neon flush of the night city waking up. I left the doors of the school unlocked behind me, Min still somewhere in there. The building was a smile of lights with one black tooth, my classroom. I unlocked my bike and walked it away like one of us might be wounded. My feet squelched and smeared something on the concrete and looking down I saw my shirt was buttoned wrong, a dog’s ear of extra fabric waving back up at me. A street cleaner moved my way, so I crossed to the other sidewalk. Unbuttoned my s
hirt and buttoned it again.

  I was late enough for dinner to not make it worthwhile, so I sat in the darkness of the small park at the end of the square. Felt wetness fall on me from the trees, sticky and organic, not rain. I called home and got no answer. It was pushing midnight, the clouds finally peeled back, the sky limitless and black again.

  When I finally sucked up the courage to cross the threshold of the apartment, it was warm inside and dark. I did my best to be quiet. I tripped over Raoul’s stupid sandals in the entrance way and had an irrational swirl of jealousy until I saw a lump on the couch, two moon-silvered feet poking out under the sheet. There were three empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter and a Tupperware of leftovers. By the light of the open fridge door I could see the stovetop marbled with burnt boil-overs. I poured myself a glass of water from the cold pitcher, and as I was closing the door to the fridge I caught sight of it. It wasn’t as big as she’d said, but it wasn’t small either. In the middle of the counter, waiting for me to walk away without noticing. I watched it a while, finished my water and lowered the upturned glass over it. Feet scraping the smooth clear walls, antennae testing the wet air.

  I couldn’t sleep, like a car on my chest. Thought I was having a heart attack, but with my age and everything I figured it wasn’t likely. Just lay there, in bed with her, staring at the ceiling. Raoul’s deep breathing coming from the living room. I couldn’t process what had happened with Min as a memory, as real event. It sat in me like something else: a premonition perhaps, that rolling gut you get when a bad thing is coming.

  In the morning Joanne’s weight shifted away from me in the bed. I trusted she was awake and could hear me. “I want us to move back home,” I said. It was a lie, because I didn’t at all know what I wanted, but it was the best I had to offer. Joanne rolled over to look at me, to make sure this wasn’t just some further cruelty, and she saw it wasn’t. She put her hand on my chest, and I could feel the quiver of a pulse at her wrist. Raoul was banging around the kitchen, the smell of fresh coffee. I rolled on top of her and stuck my hand in her underwear. She said my name and I kissed her to shut her up. I didn’t know what I wanted. To stay in this country or to go. To be with her or the opposite of her. I wanted to fuck her, I knew that. In that moment all I wanted was to fuck her loud enough that Raoul would hear us.

  TWO-MAN TENT

  MY father surprised us that day, by venturing into the far reaches of the garage and emerging, Sherpa style, with a long-forgotten tent and a flurry of dust sneezes. My mother in her bare feet on the damp deck barking instruction, seemingly helping him via echolocation. Dad’s perilous climb over the forgotten riding mower and Curtis’s old bike. For as long as I could remember he had been “a man heavily devoted to his work.” That was the official spin. Painfully mute drives to and from school, family dinner soundtracked by the fridge motor. “Your father is a provider,” my mother had said. She would often apologize for him in the form of a compliment.

  It was August, the weather unusually fine, and my father was suddenly intent on taking me camping. He’d booked off the last long weekend of the summer and bought a new provincial map at the convenience store at the foot of our street. He meant business. I was eighteen, in my last month before the big move to Halifax for school. I had grown to hate camping, like my mother, but Dad’s pleasure in the planning seemed strangely just like the old days. The entire trip was broken down and noted to the minute and mile. We left St. John’s early that Thursday morning, just the two of us, the backseat full, and a rented and fully loaded trailer behind us to demonstrate his commitment. Mom was dripping optimism in the front window watching us go. We were headed for Sand Banks Provincial Park, tucked into the southwest corner of the island down near Burgeo, where Dad said even good weather wouldn’t draw crowds. I watched him driving, counted on him to change his mind, to remember something more important and unavoidable. He never looked at me, and he never broke 90km/hour. Mom had told him to take his time.

  We had driven this road before, countless times, when I was younger and there was more time. Camping trips, the four of us, the wood-panelled station wagon. Dad was better at packing then, more economical, our gear and food relegated to the hatch, enough room for me and Curtis to sleep head to foot in the backseat. That rainstorm so bad we had to pull over and wait it out. The policeman that tried to give Dad a speeding ticket until Dad lied about me being sick and needing the hospital in Gander and then commanded me and Curtis to never lie like that ourselves. The poster over the lunch counter in the Clarenville Irving, a map of the island teeming with life: Fogo Island about to be squat by a leaping codfish, a colossal lobster threatening Gros Morne National Park. Giant animals, mythic proportions, cities and towns trembling with the hubris of touching the wild.

  Curtis said: “Do you know why they call it the Trans-Canada HIGHway?”

  I was eating pie, ice cream melting down the handle on my spoon. We had to sit at the counter because all the regular tables were full. I was short enough that my elbows couldn’t reach.

  Curtis: “Because once we get past Grand Falls it’s all mountains and rivers and dangerous cliffs so they had to build the road above it all on stilts so that people can get from one end of the island to the other without driving into a fallen rock or a waterfall or a ravine and the road is a mile up in the air with only a little metal rail to keep you from going over the edge and crashing to your death and everyone has to hold their breath and be really still and not move from their side of the car otherwise they might tip the whole works of it.”

  Curtis was older than me, but only sixteen. He always talked like he knew everything and told me stories that were hardly ever true. Dad always thought it was funny, even when Curtis was trying to frighten me. I was staring at that poster, the giant black bear about to crush the town of Buchans.

  The drive always feels longer than you expect it to be. Clarenville in the bay at the base of the hills, Gander stretching next to the lake, the great sweep of the road up and overlooking Glovertown. Grand Falls where the highway sliced fast and hard through the centre. Stretches of road in between with a long history of silence and then slowly tourist booths and craft stores, camping lodges, hotels and restaurants now, chains with commercials on TV. But this was a road into nothing once. The trailer rattled behind us, and Dad still wasn’t talking.

  He believed there was a gas station just outside the western limits of Corner Brook, but when one didn’t present itself before the turn off to Burgeo his plans hit a hard wall. The road we were to travel was a long one, a three-hour exit route with a sign posted at its entrance: No gas for three hundred and fifty kilometers. Dad eyed the gauge and cursed under his breath, rolled the car around and headed back toward the exit into Bay St. George. We were going into Stephenville in the hunt for fuel. My father had long hated Stephenville, called it the arsehole of Newfoundland when his finger grazed it on the map. When we found our first gas station it was dark, empty, and unhelpful. There was a flipped closed sign and the doors were locked. “It’s four o’clock on Thursday afternoon.” It was the most he’d said in hours.

  In the distance an electrical storm clicked its way across the top of the bay. The sky out over St. Georges looked as though night had come early with some serious flashes of warning. In the spreading gloom the town of Stephenville was growing blurry for lack of light. A sub-routing station at the top of the bay had been hit, taking out power to the entire peninsula. Every amenity within a hundred kilometers was closed, and their idle employees planted themselves at their front doors smoking and delivering the bad news: they were not expecting power to be back up and running for hours. We drove around and around but our impatience changed nothing.

  We sat in the car then, myself and my father, in the parking lot of a closed café. There was a sad kind of silence as he looked again at the map and tried to discern how it had failed him. I surprised myself by suggesting we wait for the power to come back, and then continue on our way down to the park.


  “Your mother doesn’t want us driving at night.”

  He folded the map and put it for the first time in the glove compartment. He sneezed and apologized instead of excusing himself, and drove us down the road to the Stephenville Holiday Inn. At the front desk, lit by dim reserve power, he looked for too long in his wallet, and told me he was very tired from all the driving. He booked us each a separate room. He said he’d meet me for breakfast at eight.

  The hotel was clean, but the bed was hard. I lay there watching the storm move off in the distance, and the darkness land for real. Around nine o’clock the power came on, and with it the television. I watched the news, and a story about a family killed on the 401 in Ontario and I wanted to call my mother. I knew if I did I would awaken a worry in her, so I closed my eyes and let the impulse pass. I was about to move away from home for the first time, charge fully into freedom, and I had no idea of what to expect. I wanted someone to tell me.

  Behind the whirr of the out-dated air conditioner I thought I heard my father’s voice, distant and low in the walls, and through my closed eyes I saw his face. I wondered what expression he was wearing now that he was clear of me for the night, that he would soon be clear of me for good.

  Curtis only ever let me play street hockey to be the goalie, taking fun in whizzing orange rockets into my bare shins, laughing at my attempts to suck it up and play past the pain. The star hockey player, the breaker of school records and young girls’ hearts. I was something lesser, known only to my teachers, and family it seemed, as his younger brother. I had straight As and perfect attendance, but Curtis always cast a large shadow.

  That last camping trip was for Curtis’s birthday weekend. Dad had gotten impatient on the way to Terra Nova and pulled off onto a rough dirt service road that left the highway and curled around a lake. He pitched the tent on the rocky shoulder of the service road’s end, and in the final fading light we put on our trunks and ran screaming for a swim. When we emerged the squishy bottom of the pond covered my toes and it was white instead of brown. It looked like soggy toilet paper, and Mom pulled us from the lake and didn’t allow us back in. Dad poured the rest of his bottle of rum over my feet, and Mom cursed the whole idea of camping and whoever’s idea it was in the first place. Never again, she said. Dad woke up early the next day and went to boil the kettle and found a big pile of shit outside the back of the tent. He said that it was nothing if not a bear.