Loose End

by Ivan Coyote

  Dave gave me one of those hugs a guy gives a girl he has been “just friends” with for years. The kind of hug I would kill anyone but Dave for giving me, the kind where he wraps his arms around your whole body, squeezes, and then picks you up like a linebacker picks up a cheerleader and whirls you around in a circle in front of God and Country and your Favourite Cousin right there at the Fourth Avenue Esso.

  Dave placed me back down on the heat-exhausted asphalt. I felt, rather against my will, a bit giddy. A little bit girly, even. You gotta know Dave. You gotta know that he has five (count ’em: five) completely restored classic trucks, from Mustang Orange to Candy Apple Red to Midnight Blue, a Ford, a Chevy, a coupla Dodges, maybe a Studebaker. He just picks whichever truck he feels like on whatever day, and they are all tax write-offs because he’s a mechanic. You got to know that even Brenda, the biggest dyke North of the 60th Parallel, also has the total hots for Dave Who Owns Fourth Avenue Esso. It’s mostly his salt and pepper hair and his truck collection, she’ll admit, whereas I mostly like him for his great personality. And his biceps.

  Dave leaned across the counter inside while I paid for my gas. I couldn’t help but notice that he had the perfect amount of chest hair. I traded him my new CD for three packs of Player’s Light Regular. Dave doesn’t smoke, never has, except maybe a cigar with the boys up the lake when he’s fishing, but he’s read all of my books, because of my habit.

  “How’re the kids?” I asked him. He has three now.

  “You’d really like my daughter. She’s the middle one,” Dave said, with a little daddy-like smile. “She really likes beating the shit out of her brother.” He paused for effect. “And then sometimes she picks on the little guy too.” He smiled again. “She’s . . . like you probably were.”

  I wondered for a second if Dave really thought I was the kind of kid who beat up her brothers. I wasn’t, actually, but that was probably because I didn’t have any. I just beat up all my cousins. I had to. I was the oldest.

  “She’s a real tomboy,” Dave smiled again, from a far-off place, as though fondly recalling his daughter’s fishing escapades and karate accomplishments. Dave would for sure be able to tell a real tomboy from one of those faux tomboys you always hear about.

  “She’s amazing,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “She’s so . . . great. You tomboys get so much done in a day.”

  Dave winked at me over the shoulder of the Texan who came in to pay for gassing up his motorhome. “You take care of yourself, you hear? Drop by the house sometime.”

  I nodded, making a mental note for when I get rich one day, to remind myself in ten years or so, that I need to get that middle kid of Dave’s a brand new lawn mower for her birthday.

  Mars and My Anus

  So apparently, according to my astrologer lady friend, Mars is closer to Earth these last few weeks than it has been for, like, 60,000 years. You know, the blood-coloured planet of war and aggression and whatnot. “Tempers will flare,” she warned me. “Rash decisions will be made, the oil will boil, the fuse will live dangerously close to the flame.”

  But I knew all that already. I knew something was up; the rednecks have been especially restless recently, there’s something in the air, you can smell it. I myself have been addressed in a less-than-polite fashion as a fucking dyke from someone inside a moving vehicle on four separate occasions in the last ten days alone. Sure, that one time I kinda maybe sorta cut that guy off in my station wagon because he wouldn’t let me merge and maybe I deserved a middle digit display or something of the like – but the other three occurrences were random, drive-by expletives, wholly unprovoked. I thought about maybe calling the Police/Gay Liaison Task Force, just to notify them of Mars’ position in our sky right now, and that they might want to be on high alert for the inevitable rise in homophobic violence that could very well be brought upon us by our current astrological circumstances. But then I remembered that the cops rarely raise an eyebrow at another bashing these days in these parts. They don’t seem to be able to muster up a state of mild concern, much less a high alert mode. Besides, after Mercury goes retrograde on the 28th, they’d probably just lose the e-mail anyway, I’m told.

  Anyhoo. All this got me to thinking about what exactly would possess a guy to lean out his truck window to scream the obvious at me for little or no reason, and what my most appropriate response should be, given the fact that I am Irish and not immune to Mars’ influence at the best of times myself, and have had to learn the hard way to try and avoid these kinds of situations.

  I have to be extra careful, you see, because the sort of guy who screams fucking dyke at someone from inside a moving vehicle is also statistically proven to be the very same kind of guy who would scream fucking faggot at someone, and due to my God-given gender persuasion, I often find myself mistaken for either, in fairly even numbers. And what with both Uranus and Mars in Pisces for the next while, I hear, ambiguity will abound and I reckon things are only going to get worse for the likes of me.

  I will have to remember my golden rule of self protection number one: do not get lippy with guys who think you are a guy, because studies have shown that men who scream homophobic insults from cars at people are twice as likely to pop you one in the head if they think they can take you. If they think I’m a man, then I am a small-armed, long-eyelashed young-looking one, with only fourteen hairs on my chin. So according to the bicep size to lippiness ratio, I must not be permitted under any circumstance to mouth off to someone bigger than him. It is the code of the land of men, and must be adhered to, even when just passing through.

  This can be tricky, as this is the very same kind of guy who will go ballistic if you scream something wittier back at him after he calls you a faggot, and outsmarting a redneck in traffic can be done almost by accident, if you forget to think before screaming.

  Example A: I am driving my car in an alley near my house that runs along the edge of Trout Lake Park. There are cars parked alongside the soccer field, and there is room for only one car to pass through at one time. There is a guy driving towards me in a black Saab convertible. He stops and waits for me to pull over or back up to let him by. I can do neither, due to the parked cars and two others waiting behind me. I wait for him to back up and let us all by, as there is space on his side, but instead he leans on his horn and shakes his fist. Nobody moves, and the guy behind me starts honking. I wait for Saab guy to come to his senses, and in the meantime I casually light a cigarette, just to pass the time. This enrages him for some reason and he jumps out of his car and rushes mine, screaming, “You fuckingwhotaughtyouI’mgonna . . .” until he is right beside my front tire and he stops as he realizes that maybe I’m not quite exactly what he might possibly have thought I was at first, whatever the hell that was.

  He raises his fist and mocks getting ready to punch me. “If you were a man, I would hit you right now.”

  I speak without thinking: “If you were a man, I would hit you right now.”

  This was altogether the wrong thing to say to avoid further conflict. Although humorous to recall later, it caused the man to move all his extremities in different directions at sort of the same time, feet still planted, as if fighting an evil demon inside himself who was telling him to smoke me in the head. His face was so red I was seriously concerned that he would have an aneurism, leaving me somewhat morally responsible, if you think about it.

  I also had broken golden rule number two, which is: don’t count on the “Men don’t hit women” (in public, that is) rule to apply when you look like me. Otherwise, non-woman hitting guys have been known to strike someone who looks like me with far less consequence from passers-by than one might hope. Maybe hitting a woman who kind of looks like a man is under a different sub-clause or something.

  He might have given up and just let himself pop me one, who knows, because that was right about the time the guy who lives across the street from me came walking up with a shovel in his hand to see what all the commotion was about. His name is
Dave and I have known him for eleven years. Dave and his buddy with the backhoe were digging something up in Dave’s backyard as usual, so Dave stepped into the fray wearing steel-toed boots and held up a hand the size of a small family ham, in an attempt to calm the situation as only a huge man with a shovel in his hand can.

  “This guy hassling you, Ivan?” Dave asked, eyeing the guy’s Saab with some distaste.

  I shook my head, feeling safer in the shadow of Dave at my side.

  “No, I think he was about to get his asshole self back in his Saab and back up and let the people through,” I responded, my heart still pounding, breaking my golden rule of self-protection number three: which is, know when to walk away, and know when to run.

  Who knew Kenny Rogers was right all this time?

  The guy got back in his car and sprayed gravel in reverse as he backed around the corner.

  Dave shook his head at me. “You have to be more careful. I can’t always be standing here with a shovel in my hand.”

  I nodded, then shrugged and drove ahead. Dave was right, and I should know better. One can never be too careful, especially until Mars moves on.

  I Can’t Answer That

  I saw my favourite old couple again this morning, on their daily walk about the neighbourhood. It was one of those windy bright blue and orange and red days, the ones you only get in the fall, the kind of day that tingles in the back of your nose and makes you feel like cooking soup from scratch.

  She had on a matching sweater set and windbreaker; he sported a navy-blue pea coat and those little rubber booties stretched over his good leather walking shoes. Their ancient poodle ambled along just behind them watery-eyed and leashless, as if the thought of going anywhere but where the old couple was going would never enter its poodle mind.

  The first time I noticed them was in the alley behind my house, because they didn’t walk like alley walkers. They weren’t rushing to make it home before the grandkids, they weren’t looking for empty bottles or waiting for their dog to shit so they could get home in time to catch the evening news. They were strolling, taking in the scenery, like green plastic garbage cans, rusting hot water heaters, peeled-paint garage doors, and potholes as if they were botanical gardens or the sea wall or something. They were taking their morning constitutional, and they were taking their time.

  It turns out that they live in a house about halfway down the alley from mine, so when I see them they are usually at the beginning or the end of their ritual, but I have also spotted them out and about, sometimes several kilometres from home, most often in alleys. Most people choose to walk down the façade of a street, where the lawns are mowed and the flowers grow in rows, but not these two. I thought at first they were of a recycling mind, perhaps in search of discarded kitchen chairs or a decent bookshelf they could haul home and refinish, but I have never witnessed any evidence of this. I have come to believe, over the years, that they have decided to witness their world and its inhabitants from a more truthful vantage point, to see what their neighbours have discarded, rather than what we have chosen to display.

  They talk to each other while they stroll, and the romantic in me was once curious enough to follow them for a block or so, hoping to eavesdrop a little, to overhear what two people would still have to say to each other after perhaps decades together, but they were holding hands and she was almost whispering. He laughed, throwing his head back a little, and caught a glimpse of me over his shoulder. He stopped, dropped her hand, and they parted to let me pass them on the sidewalk. I was young, and probably in a hurry. They were not. I walked between them, feeling clumsy and somewhat ashamed of myself.

  My girlfriend asked me the other day, what it was about these two that fascinated me so much. How could just the sight of them and their greying old dog move me to tears?

  I told her it was because they still held hands all the time, except, like today, when he dropped hers for a minute to slowly bend down and pick up a brightly coloured leaf. He held the leaf up against the brilliant blue sky with one thin-skinned hand for her to see, and traced its crimson veins with a long forefinger. Then he passed it to her, and she put it in her right hand along with several others they had already collected, leaving her left hand free to grasp his again until they reached their back gate.

  Once I watched them exclaim together over lilac buds for twenty minutes.

  My mother’s father died of stomach cancer and cirrhosis of the liver when I was five. I was too young to be allowed to attend, but word has it no one cried at his funeral. In every picture I have ever seen of him, he is lying on the couch in an undershirt. His feet are always bare.

  My Grandma Pat left my paternal grandfather’s bags out on the front porch with a note pinned to them telling him to never come back. He had trouble holding down a job, she told me once, and she had grown tired of moving every six months. Plus, she was damned if she was going to let any of her four sons see him hit her a second time.

  My parents divorced after twenty-six years. I went home to help my mom pack up the old house. “Who will mow the lawn?” my mom asked me, palms up, empty. We listened to all her old ABBA and Cat Stevens records, and danced together in the living room. “Your father always hated to dance,” she lamented. We were face to face, she and I; she held both of my hands in hers. “My God, you look just like him.”

  My girlfriend and I walk the dogs up the other side of Victoria Drive, admiring all the old houses there. We want a porch with windows and a swing, and a fireplace. We talk about herb gardens and how we could easily knock a couple of windows into that garage so I could have a private place to write. I make a mental note to take a stained-glass-making course. I tell her I secretly always wanted to be an architect. We wonder together what future generations will remember this decade by, and who invented stucco, anyway? We notice how when the wind blows the leaves off the sidewalk, there are little brown leaf shadows left on the pavement sometimes. But they must fade quickly, I decide, because I don’t remember ever seeing them in the spring.

  I wake up in the middle of the night because her cat is standing on my head. I move around too quickly and now we’re both up. I press myself closer to the heat of her.

  “Do you want to be like that old couple up the alley with me?” I ask her in the dark.

  “Maybe,” she whispers back, half-asleep again, “if you get your fucking elbow out of the small of my back.”

  I love how she hates it when I do that.

  Single Malt

  My dad used to be easy to shop for. Every Christmas and birthday, for as long as I can remember, I have got him a bottle of single malt scotch. What brand I chose changed yearly; it depended largely on my economic status come shopping time, but that was all okay by him. I knew in my leaner years that he could just pawn the cheaper stuff off on his visitors. I’ve caught him guiltlessly pouring an Oban for himself, back turned, while simultaneously serving his houseguests Johnnie Walker Red. I once caught him trying to pull this stunt on me, red-faced with a bottle of Canadian Club in his hand, as if he thought I wouldn’t know the difference.

  I reminded him I had been trained by a professional.

  A couple of Christmases ago, my Uncle Rob trapped me coming out of the washroom to have words with me about this. “Why buy booze for a guy who drinks too much?” he asked me with rum and eggnog on his breath. “Why not get him socks or something, like everybody else does now?”

  Rob had a point, to be sure, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it all. But my dad already owns every tool known to mankind, never wears ties, hates sports of any stripe, and only wears work shirts. The contents of his closet reveal a repeating pattern: GWG boot cut jeans, thirty three-inch waist, thirty three-inch leg. White Stanfield T-shirts, size medium. Blue BVDs, also medium. Tan work boots, size nine men’s. Grey and white work socks, the kind with the red stripe. He reckons if you own all the same socks, you don’t have to throw both away when you get a hole in one. Easier to sort that way, too. A couple o
f summers ago he got himself a pair of sandals, and the whole family almost fell over in collective shock. Buying him clothes as a gift would be like going out for supplies.

  My dad throws stuff away when he knows he won’t use it, even gifts. After a couple of Boxing Day heartbreaks when taking out his garbage, I settled myself into buying him something I was sure he would love, something I knew would never go to waste. Scotch it was.

  Last spring my dad called me out of the blue, which should have been my first clue that something big was up. The second alarm bell went off when he asked me how my girlfriend was. Sure, he didn’t know her name, but that was as much my fault as it was his: I had stopped telling him years ago. But still, he asked.

  Then the bottom fell out of all things predictable. My father interrupted me, stopped himself, and went on to say the following: “I’m sorry, I interrupted you. What was that you were saying?”

  I immediately called my grandmother to find out if he was okay. “Is my father dying of cancer or something? He’s acting very weird. First of all, he called me up just to talk. Then, he apologized for interrupting me. Is everything alright?”

  “Of course,” she said, laughing her little laugh, letting air out through her nose like she does. “The new Don takes a little getting used to. Yesterday, he called to let me know he was going to be late for lunch. Very unusual, indeed. Usually he just wouldn’t show up and then avoid me until he thought I’d forgotten. But everything is different since he quit drinking.”