by Robert Chafe
Curtis said: “There’s no reason to be afraid of animals because they are more afraid of you. When we go camping where do we sleep? This little tent, this little bit of fabric. But when animals go camping, where do they sleep? When they come to camp in the city, to get away from it all, they sleep in cages and we sleep in tents because there’s nothing to fear in the woods, and everything to fear in the city.”
After the accident Dad put away anything that had any connection to Curtis. Family pictures, his bike, that tent. Never again, Mom had said, and she was right. They never told me anything about what had happened. That I knew Curtis had died at all felt at times like too much. I cried once and said I missed him. There was something happening in my house, and it involved everyone but me.
The phone rang and woke me up and it was Mom. Dad had phoned her last night after we had checked in and now she was checking in herself. She told me that Dad had decided the wasted night in Stephenville had somehow corrupted the entire trip and he had made the decision to abort and head home first thing after breakfast. She asked me if I was ok, and I said yes. She said she loved me. I said ditto, which was a stupid thing to say. I missed the phone cradle when I hung up, dropped the receiver between the bed and the wall and left it there until it started to yelp. There were fingers of daylight on the ceiling.
He was waiting in the restaurant. He had already ordered for himself and was craning his neck for the waitress for a coffee refill. He asked me if Mom had called and I contemplated saying no, to see what he would do. Always Mom, always the bearer of Dad’s uncomfortable news. I nodded yes, told him he had ketchup on his shirt. He looked at me like he thought I was kidding and so I pointed.
The waitress arrived and I ordered an omelette and some club soda and I pointed at his shirt again and he said he didn’t need it or want it. The waitress’s nametag said Lois. It made me think of the stupid cartoon strip. She took my menu and said she’d be back with coffee.
Dad tapped his mug with his wedding ring, his knee jumping under the table. I asked him how he had slept. He shrugged, tried to take a slurp from the already empty mug. There was a man at the next table with a camouflage outfit: vest, pants, hat, the works. Maybe he was a hunter, on his way into the woods, tracking and killing food for his family for the long winter ahead. He will sleep in a tent tonight, I decided. He will be bitten by flies, and maybe more. This is a man who is not afraid of the wild.
Lois returned with the coffee carafe and my father changed his mind and put his hand over the top of his mug. Lois asked if we needed anything else. When she was out of earshot I asked him if he thought an apology was in order and he said: “Let’s not do this here.” I had really been talking about Lois and her wasted trip to get the coffee.
“I’m just tired,” he said.
He stared at that half-empty plate in front of him, did lacklustre origami with the paper napkin.
I was disappointed: inexplicably, infuriatingly. How often will we see each other now? That was the question on my mind. When I move to Halifax, what will be left of us then? All we shared now was a bathroom. What will we have with a two-day drive and a ferry between us? I asked him if I could drive on the way home, and he said yes. Reparations maybe, for having wasted my time.
Dad had been with Curtis when it happened. I was seven and the hills outside were in early evening red, and Mom was silhouetted against them in our big front window, the black curl of the telephone cord up to her ear. There was an accident she told me when she hung up. Your brother, she said. I only know Dad was with him because when they finally brought him home, Mom rushed Dad past me into the bedroom. She came out ten minutes later with a black plastic garbage bag, and I knew it was Dad’s clothes, his favourite denim shirt, blood stained and unsalvageable. There was a terrible accident, but your father is fine. But why that bandage on his hand then? And why can’t I see him?
Curtis once said: “A mother giraffe will leave her baby behind if it’s not up and running fifteen minutes after it’s born. Sometimes hamsters eat their own young. There’s a certain type of shark where the pups eat each other while they’re still inside the mom’s belly. And a spider whose babies eat their own mother right after they’re born. Nature is cruel.”
All I could think: what would the garbage men do? What would they think if that stuffed black trash bag were to rip, and the lapel of Dad’s denim shirt were to make a break for the open air. So much blood there. So much gore leaving our family home, and without the benefit of a story to make sense of it all.
By the time we hit Goobies it had clouded over for real, and there was a mist mixing with the bug guts on the windshield, gumming up the wipers. Dad was more talkative, reading traffic signs and roadside advertising, offering his incessant advice to slow down. I was the quiet one now, and it seemed to be stoking a fear in him. He kept talking so I wouldn’t get a chance. Our clock was winding down, five days until my own caravan would hitch up and ride out, backtrack over this very same road to catch the ferry.
Just outside of the national park, there was a car pulled over on the opposite side of the road, its hazard lights flashing and its bonnet popped. A woman stood next to the passenger door, futzing with her backpack. She saw us crest the hill and waved a free hand. I started to slow down and as we neared I could see a pair of sneakered men’s feet poking out under the front bumper. I started to bring us over onto the shoulder and Dad asked what I was doing. The answer was too obvious to say out loud and I let the tires run over the rumble strip and onto the raw gravel beyond it. Dad said that Mom was expecting us and that we didn’t have time. The man slid from under the bottom of the car across the street, sat on the ground in front of the bumper, offered a small wave of thanks and relief. I went to put my window down, and Dad grabbed my other arm and told me we had to go.
“It will just take a second,” I said.
And my father spat my name at me, told me to drive. He let go of my arm and sat heavily back in his seat, stared out the front window.
“Drive,” he said.
The man and woman were looking at us, their hair already pasted to their foreheads by the damp air. They smiled, waved again, somehow understanding what I still didn’t. The man went back under his car, and I pulled our own out onto the road and continued on down the hill.
The silence was loud then. I turned on the radio, and Dad turned it off again.
“You just don’t listen,” he said eventually, cleaning his glasses with his shirt.
“Why did we even come?” It was whiny and petulant, and not the way I wanted to broach it. But he surprised me by answering anyway.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Pull over. Pull over, please.”
I swung the car onto the shoulder again, a bit too quickly, popped the door and got out. For a second I contemplated walking, looked down the highway towards home and wondered how far my rage would take me. Dad took his time getting into the driver’s seat, and once there waited patiently enough for me to get back in. And then he rolled us, slowly, sheepishly, back out into traffic.
The weather had cleared by the time we got home and there was a trace of red in the sky over the hills. My temper had cooled too, and I told Dad I would unload the car and the trailer and that he could leave it with me. He didn’t argue, headed inside, clicked the garage opener. The rattle of the tracks and Mom above them in the window watching me.
I piled the gear roughly into the garage, plopped the tent on top of the pile I’d made. My generosity waned and I decided against packing it away properly. I carried the food and the full cooler up the front step, kicked a knock, handed it in to Mom. She gave me a pitiful little look that I was having none of. I toed off my sneakers and went to wash my face.
When I came out of the bathroom I could hear them talking in the kitchen. It was cool and lazy and routine and I felt a weird pang of betrayal that there was no anger there. The photo of them on the wall by the bathroom, back when they first met. My mother like some foreign creature. Her
dark hair towering above her brow in a beehive. Dad next to her, his round face of today somehow preserved in reverse, thinner, more hair. A working man, an intimate knowledge of sweat and ache. He looks tall. His spine stretching itself back then in something close to confidence.
The last few hours of sun had been enough to dry the grass, and it was warm. With the last vestiges of my spite I decided the gear should have some use and I pitched the tent in the backyard. Once it was up and secure I decided I would sleep in it. The manufacturer called it a four-man tent, but it barely had room for two. I had the small battery-operated lantern on at the head of the sleeping bag, just enough to read by. I was readying to turn it off when I heard the back door of the house open and close and bare feet pad across the deck.
“Knock knock.”
The front panel unzipped and my father stuck his head in.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry again.”
He hadn’t said it the first time.
“Are you going to be all right out here?”
I contemplated making some joke about the wild Newfoundland dingo, but I thought better of it. He asked if he could come in, and was halfway through the triangle flap by the time I got it together to answer. He sat cross-legged in front of the door, barring me from quick escape, head poking the low slanted roof, hands folded in his lap.
It was evident that Mom had made him do this, her anger with him reserved until I was fully out of earshot. Or maybe it was the sight of the tent, blooming again after so long, maybe that was enough of a shock to his pride. Either way, this was unnecessary. I had already fallen back into the comfortable mould. I knew what my father was and what he was not.
“He was under the car, you see.”
For a second I thought he was talking about the man broken down on the highway, and then I realized he wasn’t. Dad put his hand out then, trying to touch something in the air in front of him, a memory. Curtis himself.
“His head, it was wedged between the pavement and the muffler. His face was up against the muffler. The hot muffler of this man’s car. I was on my stomach and I was trying to get my hand in there, in between his head and the muffler, because it was burning him. The muffler was burning his face. His face was very badly burnt.”
He stopped talking for a second and looked at me to see if I was still with him. I could see the scars on his hand, and knew what he was saying was true. I reached out and pushed his hand down. I thought about holding it, but that felt stupid and wrong, and so I let it go. And the memory went with it. And that was ok. And that was probably for the best.
He sat there blinking at me. “You can care too much for somebody. Sometimes.” He looked at me, nodding his question. Did I understand.
My mother said: “Your father’s all right. The doctor said that he’ll be fine.” All that blood on his denim shirt wasn’t his own, but how could a doctor claim knowledge of anything else. The rupture somewhere behind his eyes. We’d all come to see it in time. Silent breakfasts and bad origami. Ketchup stains. The world is eventually made ugly for us all.
“Time to move on.”
I wasn’t sure which one of us said it, and when I looked at him he was smiling. It was the first time in ages I’d seen him like that. His face cracked open with it, all teeth and tongue, strange to me and in the moment almost grotesque. Is this what you do when I’m not around? Do you smile in your life now? All those years ago, I cried and said I missed Curtis. I didn’t. I just missed you.
I faked a smile of my own.
He backed his way out of the tent door, said he’d see me in the morning and zipped me back in. I could hear his lonely walk back to the house, the sound of the door clicking locked behind him.
I was lying on top of my sleeping bag. The tent rattled by a wind and zipped to the night, and I spread myself to fill its floor. For the first time I had an unexpected swell of sadness about leaving home, and then just as quickly it was gone again. There were crickets outside in the grass, movement in the trees, wind or something more. Worms and ants burrowing below me, ravens black against the night sky above. The big bark and howl of the world outside, and I was one paper thin wall away from it all.
WOOF (3)
December 2, 2012
Here I am.
Hey. It works!
This is panda, yes?
Supposedly this app is completely free. Yes, it’s me, is my photo displayed?
No photo.
I should add one too I suppose.
How are you?
I see your photo now.
No photo yet for Panda.
brb
k
back
See your pic now!
Ah good
This app seems really fast, which is cool
Yay! No being tied to the laptops now to chat. We can just text whenever. :)
And it allows for free int’l.
What you mean free calls too??
Yes, if I’ve read the app description correctly.
Wanna try?
Ima try to call you now
k
<17 minutes later>
As first calls go that was relatively low stress no?
(and you sound better than duchovny.)
Heehee. It was nice to chat with you.
Did you hear an accent from me? Some people say its really pronounced.
A little accent.
Hey. I keep forgetting to ask you: do you speak Vietnamese?
Just can say some menu items, can understand bits of conversations.
Cool. But you speak french fluently right?
Mais yes.
Oh lemme practice sending you a photo.
Washington National Cathedral
Cool! Loverly!
Hey Panda, are you religious?
Mom was Buddhist, dad’s side was Methodist. But no religious upbringing.
Time for foods. Catcha later Noodles.
December 10, 2013
I just ordered breakfast at my local diner. Its just me and a squillion elderly people.
Where is this breakfast joint? An old age home?
It happens to be down the road from a large retirement facility, yes. And a kmart.
When we were kids my father used to call it “kmart down”, a play on Bob Barker’s “come on down” from the Price is Right.
The things you remember…
How fun. Wish I had a dad.
:(
Sorry Panda.
Can I ask how he passed away?
Liver cancer when I was little. All my family had cancer.
Awful. A lot of cancer in my family too.
I figure I got a good ten years left.
All the men in my family die in their sixties
Since I have no progeny I will blow all my time and money on travel.
I have reservations to go to Korea and the Maldives in May.
Dude. How awesome!
You should go with me. Was going alone on this one.
Um, really?
I don’t know. How much would that cost me wonders.
Plan for spring 2013. If I haven’t succumbed to cancer by then.
We need to meet before then though right? Face to face?
No, its all or nothing. We meet at the airport.
December 17, 2013
Do you own a dog? Have I asked you that?
I wish. Maybe I go to shelter soon.
What flavour?
I like those little Norwich Terriers. But anything fluffy.
I like squat little faces. Boxers or pugs. :)
You have a five guys burgers up there?
I don’t think so.
Can you purchase anything in your communist country?
Lol. Are you trying to provoke me into a political discussion, tea bagger?
No.
Sent you an IM. Check your email.
Why back to IM?
I don’t know.
I didn’t want to thumb type it.
Dec.
17, 2012
1:23 PM me: hey
G______: I like thumb typing.
me: do you have many liberal friends?
me: Just out of curiosity.
1:27 PM G______: My closest friends are also conservative. I don’t get close to liberals anymore cuz tired of the hateful bashing and bullying and stereotyping and discrimination.
1:30 PM me: Ok.
1:32 PM me: You should know that as much as you are conservative, I’m pretty far left liberal. I only say so out of this silent anxiety I’ve been holding on to. You know?
1:35 PM G______: I knew you were liberal. I like chatting with you.
