The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  Apparently Travis had most of the upper storey to himself. Across the hall was what he referred to as the “viewing room” where they might later watch an episode of Forgotten River. From the doorway Thorstad saw rows of armchairs facing a screen almost as wide as the wall. “Me and my friends have marathons in here. Once we watched the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy—no breaks except for bathroom and food.”

  Beyond his small bedroom, the room at the end of the hallway had its own bathroom and had probably been meant for guests originally, but it had been furnished as an exercise room, with treadmill, weights, mat, and a pair of rings hanging from the ceiling. Fencing masks and two foils were displayed on one wall. “Here’s where I keep my body in Hollywood shape.”

  When he’d stripped off his shirt to step onto the treadmill it was clear the “Hollywood shape” was meant as a joke. His upper body was mostly visible bones.

  Of course this tour was meant to delay a study session. Would he be required to stand by and watch this youth walk on the spot until it was time for bed or the ten o’clock news? But Travis hadn’t taken many steps before it was clear the boy meant to make this an interview. “Tell me about your father. I mean, what sort of film was he in?”

  Thorstad wasn’t sure how he might describe Desperation. A crime story? “I suppose it was a sort of film noir.” He sat on a bench against the wall in case this eventually turned out to be worth staying for. Though Travis was literally walking “on the spot” he was obviously attempting to go somewhere else with his questions.

  “He was murdered?”

  No adult had ever asked this quite so bluntly. “He was simply jumping off the roof of one building onto a lower one. And missed.” Obviously this boy had hoped for a crime. Maybe this was what working in television did to you. “The jump was being filmed. I’ve seen it. I own a copy of the movie.”

  Travis stepped off the treadmill and removed a towel from a wall rack to mop his face and skinny chest, though he hadn’t walked far enough to break a sweat. “You bring it with you?”

  “It’s in a safety deposit box at my bank.” Along with Elena’s rings and his ancient teaching licence. Not that any of this had to do with why they were upstairs in this house but avoiding the “study.”

  Travis tossed the towel aside and reached for the phone on the wall. “Tell me the title and I can pick it up at Blockbuster.”

  But Blockbuster did not have a copy of Desperation. Nor did Pic-a-Flic have the movie, which Travis learned had never been released on video or DVD. It was possible that Thorstad’s was one of very few surviving copies of the film.

  Now a pair of barbells was taken from a rack and put to halfhearted use. “Did it make a difference, knowing you were the son of a stuntman? Did you throw yourself off horses when you were a kid? You can guess how exciting it is to be a dentist’s son.”

  Of course, even as a boy Axel Thorstad had been as interested in the stunt doubles as he’d been in the stars. Even now, he remembered the names of Tom Steele, Dave Sharpe, Eddie Parker, Henry Wills, Fred Carson, and Yakima Canutt. Henry Wills had done twelve hundred falls in his career, mostly from horses. Fred Carson had done a “horse fall” as late as 1959 and lived into the twenty-first century. Canutt had become a “ramrod” or boss of stunt crews later, and introduced the safety standards that might have saved his father if they’d existed earlier. “My father might have known the great Cliff Lyons, who was in the original Ben-Hur. For all I know they could have been pals. The movie world was smaller then.”

  But it seemed there was still more Travis needed to know about this stranger who might become part of his life. “Dad told me you were a swimming champ—way back. A friend of mine’s on a swim team, says they make him shave his body hair. They do that in your day?”

  “The legs,” Thorstad said. Shaving the legs had been common practice even in the distant days of his youth. “It was supposed to increase your feel for the water.” He pulled up his pant leg a little to show how thick the hair was now. “I shaved my head as well, which was eccentric for the time. But my real advantage was these limbs—a wingspan wider than most.” When he spread his arms to demonstrate, Travis said “Cool!” though Thorstad suspected he resembled a gliding pterodactyl.

  Once Travis had returned the weights to their rack, he studied Thorstad for a few moments as though he was trying to think of more questions to ask, though of course he could be simply assigning a grade. After a few moments he said, “I’m gonna have a shower and put in a little study time before bed. Maybe you could give me a hand.”

  In his “study,” Travis pulled up a second chair so that Thorstad could join him at his desk. It had been a long time since he had sat at any but his own custom-made desk, so joining Travis meant trying to find a place for his legs beneath this one. Books were toppled in the attempt, a lamp prevented from falling. In the end he sat at an angle.

  He withdrew his reading glasses from his pocket, held them up to the light, wiped them on his shirt, and put them on. One ear and then the other. Travis had gone on the Internet and printed copies of the previous year’s exams, and was less surprised than Thorstad to discover a large portion of the English final would be best-answer questions that could be marked by a computer. There were also short essays to be written, however, and because Travis admitted to a dread of writing essays, this gave Thorstad a topic for their first session: the importance of defining your terms before anything else. “Let them see you know what you’re talking about.” He folded back the page and laid the essay question out before them on the desk. “This asks you to discuss Gulliver’s Travels: The Voyage to Lilliput as an allegory. Do you know what an allegory is?”

  Travis shrugged, as he was probably required by the rules of adolescence to do.

  Axel Thorstad cautioned himself to be patient. “You know it isn’t a building. Or a tree. Or a lyric poem.”

  “Yeah-yeah. Right. Sure. Okay. I get it. It’s like, you know, a story.”

  Thorstad was patient but not so easily satisfied. “It’s a good idea to remember there are four aspects to a good definition. The second: What kind of story? What makes it different from, say, a Harlequin romance or a newspaper report? You’ve told me a category, but now we need to know how it’s different from other stories—before we come up with an example—other than Gulliver’s Travels—and finally an explanation of its function—what it does.”

  Travis cringed while pronouncing the word “symbolic.” Since he could not follow it with an example, Thorstad was pleased to bring Geoffrey Chaucer into the conversation. “Isn’t ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ still on the course? The story of a boastful rooster and his clucking hens sounds suspiciously like an allegory to me.”

  “Yes!” Travis jerked upright in his chair. “Listen—Old Man Struthers played . . . you got to hear this. A rap version!” He tapped at his keyboard, waited, and tapped again. “This is the one about the three greedy men who go looking for Death?”

  A powerful thumping rhythm drove the voice of a young man through rhyming couplets like a series of jabs with a fist.

  “They met this guy all wrapped in bandages,

  An old handicapped man, with disadvantages,

  And the three friends examined his bleeding flesh,

  And demanded he tell them how he was cheating Death.

  Seeming perplexed, the old man responded with soft words,

  And said, ‘I walk the earth like a creature God has cursed!

  My lot is the worst and most desperate place to be;

  I pray faithfully every day for Death to take me,

  Waiting patiently, and someday he will arrive,

  But in the meantime, until I die, I’m still alive.’”

  Once the three greedy men had killed one another in “rap” language much as they had in Middle English, Travis explained that Old Man Struthers had invited the fellow who wrote this to visit the classroom but he’d been too busy with other gigs.

  What Axel Thorstad exp
erienced now was envy. This was the sort of the thing he would have done himself if he’d been in the classroom still—surprise his students with a visit from this young performer, hoping the “rap” version of The Canterbury Tales would send them to the original. But it was Old Man Struthers’s turn, and Old Man Thorstad’s only job today was to get Travis back to the essay question and discover what could be learned for the exam he was still to face.

  If the boy—the lad? the youth? in today’s newspapers boys his age were often referred to as “men” whether they’d earned it or not—if Travis had wanted to drive him off he should probably not have invited him into a discussion of The Canterbury Tales, even reborn as contemporary rap. “Good. Fine. Now back to this essay question. Identifying terms: general type, then specific differences, then an example, and finally its function.”

  Some time during the night he dreamed again the sort of nightmare that had often invaded his sleep while he was teaching but had gradually faded since retirement. He was always a teacher in these dreams—one night dealing with an uprising of students determined to eliminate him with weapons pulled from their desks, another night suffering a series of detours between home and school forcing him farther and farther away from his classroom where he knew an impatient superintendent waited to watch him in action before writing a crucial report. This time he’d driven all over town in search of a film projector essential to the day’s lessons, then entered his classroom without the faintest idea what he was going to teach, discovering he was naked and badly in need of the toilet, which was in the very centre of the crowded classroom. Nothing like these situations had actually happened, yet in sleep he was forced to experience them as though some secret part of him wished to taste the excruciating humiliations of inverted reality. Always, he woke in the hot soup of his own sweat.

  This time the seventeen-year-old Angus Walker was in the dream—sitting in the window row, fourth desk from the front. Someone was reading “Ode to the West Wind” aloud. Angus looked up, waited for a pause in the reading, and said, “You think it was Byron’s club foot that turned the women on, or did he have some other deformity they don’t mention in books?” This was more or less what had occurred. The classroom had erupted with laughter. A lad at the back stood up to demonstrate with his hand where and what this deformity might have been. But then in the dream the clean-cut Angus, clever son of the town’s optometrist, stood up and limped across the front of the classroom dressed in rags and a huge overcoat, his feet in unlaced boots with rundown heels, his face disfigured with blackheads and scarlet boils. He dragged one foot behind him out through the classroom doorway and, when Thorstad went out to call him back, disappeared into the chaos of students trying to get out of the building as fast as possible.

  At the breakfast table Audrey Montana presented Thorstad with his plane reservation. Perhaps she feared he might never make a decision. His “e-ticket,” she called it, a term he’d never heard before. Apparently it wasn’t really a ticket at all, but something to help the person at the check-in counter find him on the airline’s computer.

  Of course this explanation was meant to give him time to get used to this development. Well, a person did not so easily get used to bullies. “I’m afraid you’ll have wasted your money. I haven’t made a decision.”

  Carl, obviously amused, wanted to know how long he’d been away from the world, to have forgotten how things are done. “I think it’s called the pre-emptive strike. In Audrey’s work it is a matter of having the papers ready for the undecided buyer to sign—a nudge, so to speak, in the preferred direction.” He placed his large pale hand over his wife’s much smaller one, perhaps a pre-emptive strike of his own. “A plane reservation can be cancelled, of course.” A brief pause for a possible protest from the one who had purchased the ticket, but she had chosen to bite her tongue and look away. “I hope, though, that you’ve kept your passport up to date.”

  “Otherwise,” Travis said, “you’re off the hook. Unless they hire smugglers to take you over at night, hidden beneath a shipment of crystal meth.”

  The sun had risen from behind the mainland mountains high enough to shine in Thorstad’s eyes through the little breakfast room’s wall of glass. Thirty minutes earlier he’d been out in that choppy water for his morning swim, giving all the long muscles of his restless limbs a workout. The familiar taste of the salt water was with him still, in spite of the good hot shower. He wasn’t sure he possessed a valid passport.

  Seeing his hesitation, Mrs. Montana sat forward and clasped her hands together on the glass table, obviously putting effort into maintaining her calm. Everyone’s knees were visible beneath the floating coffee cups and plates of toast.

  “Just a minute,” Thorstad said. “Let me think.” Naturally he’d allowed his passport to expire soon after moving to the island, foreseeing no reason to renew it, but when his driver’s licence expired as well, he’d begun to feel as though he was relinquishing a little too much of his identity. Since he’d seen little point in renewing his driver’s licence, he’d applied for a new passport on the slim chance that he might decide to revisit Madrid one day, to look up Elena’s birthplace. That must have been three or four years ago now.

  Mrs. Montana closed her eyes while he explained this, her fingers pressed to her temples. No doubt a headache was coming on.

  “But I saw no reason to bring it with me.” He had not been warned, he meant, that a plot had been hatched requiring international travel.

  “Then we must get it!” Mrs. Montana was working hard for restraint. “Do they have phones up there? Could you tell someone where to find it?”

  Carl drained his third cup of breakfast coffee. “If you don’t want Audrey to drive up and look for your passport herself—and probably sell your house to a consortium of Texas oilmen while she’s there—you’d better phone someone and get this business started.”

  Whenever he and Elena had flown to Europe a passport had been required, but when he and his friends had flown to California during his first year of teaching, just having a ticket was enough to get you a boarding pass, and having a boarding pass was enough to get you on the plane. A driver’s licence had been enough to prove you were who you said you were. It would never occur to you that the fellow beside you might have a bomb in his shoe. Why would he?

  But his dream of Angus Walker had not entirely faded. He pushed his chair back from the table, preparing to stand. “I’ll phone about the passport later, in case it’s needed. But first, if you’ll tell me where to catch a bus I’ll go downtown while Travis is in school. Angus Walker might be more approachable early in the day.”

  Mrs. Montana drew air through her teeth.

  Carl put a hand on Thorstad’s shoulder. “Please don’t. There’s nothing you can do for him. Chances are, having you see him yesterday will have embarrassed him. You could make him feel even worse.”

  “My Lord!” Mrs. Montana stood up and left the room, carrying her coffee but leaving her plate and cutlery behind.

  Travis, too, was on his feet. “I’ll drive you to a bus stop on my way to school.”

  But he should have listened to Carl. When he joined them late that afternoon for a glass of wine before dinner, he could report only that Walker had not been found. He hadn’t been at the drop-in centre, and the dishwasher had advised against looking. He’d even suggested that Thorstad could be sorry if he found Walker. “He has a history of making life hell for anyone who tries to help.”

  Apparently Walker sometimes camped in one of the parks, or down on the beach. But the dishwasher had warned him to be careful, explaining that some of these people had been turned out of institutions, thanks to a government that considered addiction, mental health, and unemployment to be none of their business. “Their business,” he’d added, “is making sure the Profit-god keeps smiling on the rich. What you see here, my friend, is the future— anyone who isn’t wealthy will be destitute.”

  So with a tray of doughnuts and steaming coffees
he had set off through the city’s largest park where there were bodies behind the occasional bush, most of them snoring. Amongst the few who opened their eyes, no one was able to tell him where Walker could be found. Park gardeners planting red-leafed begonias were as indifferent to his search as they were to the peacocks’ screams for help. Beyond the duck pond and the petting zoo he’d followed a dirt path down into the woods, where he came upon five or six people sleeping on a king-size four-poster bed, its canopy decorated with ribbons, miniature flags, and dead bunches of flowers, along with items ransacked from a child’s toy box—racing cars and dolls and skipping ropes. Nobody stirred.

  At the foot of the wooden staircase to the beach he set out along the uneven bed of boulders, careful not to slip and break his neck. Here, the mountains to the south and east seemed surprisingly near, perhaps because of the morning sunlight. He’d forgotten this city faced the coastline of a foreign country—a nation that liked to call itself “America” as though a dozen other nations sharing these continents were of little consequence, as though Spain were to refer to itself as “Europe,” for instance, making Juan Carlos the King of Europe, whatever the Poles or Portuguese might think.

  But Walker had not been down on the beach, though several others were. At the sound of Walker’s name, a red-bearded fellow stepped out of a construction of driftwood to accuse Walker of stealing his sleeping bag. Farther down the beach a man in a logger’s woollen undershirt and wide braces rose to his feet on a plywood-surfaced raft flying what appeared to be a high school football pennant. The raft was furnished with cot and camp stove and an ancient traveller’s trunk. The Globe and Mail lay neatly on a wooden crate, magazines stacked beside it with the New Yorker on top. This man’s face seemed to have been boiled for a while and then attacked by giant mosquitoes. He reported that there’d been a big fight last night. Walker must’ve got into some bad dope or something. The cops had come down and taken him away before he could do more damage.