by D. D. Miller
There are a million flies buzzing around the back of the Hamiltons’; the wasps don’t even bother with our side of the yard anymore. There was a point around week four of the strike when I couldn’t sit outside: the smell was too much. Now eight weeks in, I’m back outside and only catch a faint hint of it. I don’t think my sense of smell will ever be the same again.
The contents of the Hamiltons’ house are piled on their side of the back deck. It’s mostly in bags, but there are nicotine-stained lampshades, half-rotting chairs and other pieces of old, broken furniture. Mr. Hamilton’s shoes are lined up in a neat row in front of it all. They’re mostly what you’d expect from an old man: faded loafers; a pair of grass-stained golf shoes; dusty, black dress shoes. But then there’re those shoes he was wearing when I first saw him. The black Converse canvas shoes every kid standing outside of music venues downtown has jutting out from under their skinny jeans. I can’t begin to imagine how Mr. Hamilton came to own a pair.
A huge shadow moves over the lawn. Like a low, ominous cloud has just formed above our house. I look up and slowly it comes into view from over the roof of the house: first the snout, then the whole head and, finally, the body. It’s a massive flying pig. A huge, pink balloon like a float in a parade. On the side is written “Son of Son of Flying Pig.” On the belly I can make out “97.7 XFM. X Marks The Spot.” The pig is floating at a pretty good pace. There are long cords dangling from its feet. It’s too far away to tell for sure, but I bet there are Steele’s Heavy Wire Jaw Clamps at the ends of them. It’s what I would have recommended when I worked at Gould’s. I can’t see how they would ever fail though, so I assume it must’ve been the fasteners. Faulty fasteners.
It was early July, just a few weeks into the strike, when we met the Hamiltons’ son, Andrew. He stopped by one evening after dinner. He was tall and athletic in that I-was-a-big-time-high-school-superstar kind of way: he was soft and languid now. He wore pressed khakis, a greyish polo T-shirt. Clean shaven, his skin was near to perfect, with only a barely visible line of summer freckles crossing the bridge of his nose.
He explained to us that his father, who’d been suffering from emphysema, had caught another bout of pneumonia and was in the hospital on oxygen, and it didn’t look good. He didn’t respond much to our condolences and ended up walking away before we could think to invite him inside.
The old man lasted another two weeks or so.
When Andrew eventually took Edna away to a nursing home, I remember lying in bed, feeling inexplicably angry. “I think Mr. Hamilton wanted to go before his wife,” I said. “He probably knew Edna wasn’t going to last much longer and decided to get the jump on her.”
Heather was undressing at the foot of the bed. She dropped her shirt on the floor and stared hard at me, wearing nothing but a bra and jeans. Her toes gripped the carpet. “What are you talking about?”
“He was selfish. He didn’t want to be left alone.” I shifted under the sheets, crossed my feet.
“You didn’t even know them,” she said, kicking the pant leg from her foot.
“He never once took her out that I ever saw.” I crossed my arms. “He had that nurse come and push her up and down the street. He wouldn’t even do that for her.”
“They were married for, like, forty years or something. We knew them for a few months. Don’t judge.”
Heather got into bed and curled up in a fetal ball. I reached over and touched her bare shoulder. She didn’t move.
Before I was laid off we had been trying to get pregnant. Heather had stopped taking the pill, and we were doing it whenever and wherever we could. We had to cool it after we lost my income, but she never went back on the pill, and we hadn’t had sex for weeks.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t really sure what I was sorry about, or whether or not I even needed to be. I lay back and stared up at the ceiling. In the distance I could hear the 11:05 go train approaching.
On the radio they’ve been tracking the flight of Son of Son of Flying Pig and have been encouraging people to phone in their sightings. The massive blimp – XFM’s Toronto Summer Fest float – is caught up in air currents and has been making its way back and forth throughout the city. I glance up at the sky but see nothing but blue. Not even a cloud.
I look over at the Hamiltons’ pile of garbage. Mr. Hamilton’s shoes are still there. That pair of black Converse canvas sneakers, still in nearly perfect shape. I get up, jump the little picket fence and cover my mouth as I walk up the back steps toward the pile. Wasps and flies buzz all around me, but I grab the sneakers and rush back into my yard.
They are a little tight, but are canvas and, aside from the tightness, they are comfortable and certainly hipper than anything I’ve ever worn. I get up and walk around the lawn. Then I walk out toward the front of the house and begin to stroll down our street. I can’t help but stare down at them and admire them the way you do with new shoes, feeling that silent sort of arrogance you get from new footwear. As I walk, I begin to imagine that I’m pushing Edna Hamilton down the street in her wheelchair. I imagine that I’m Mr. Hamilton, only he has his whole life to live over again, and he’s decided to take his wife for walks, to love her with all of his heart, even if she is no longer the same woman he married.
I turn at the end of the block and head back. The shoes aren’t stretching as well as I thought they would, and my toes are already starting to ache. I can feel a blister forming on my heel.
When I near our duplex, I am surprised to see someone in the Hamiltons’ front window. More surprised that it’s Edna. I stop right in the middle of the street and stare. She looks different from before. She’s resting her chin in her hand; her sharp, bare elbow perched on the sill. She’s staring off over my head, over the houses across the street, and I feel like I’m seeing Edna as she truly was. Reflective, sad even, slightly paler than usual. Today, she seems lost in thought. I wait and watch her stare into nothing. I’m moved by this, by seeing her capable of such simplicity.
Eventually, she looks down at me and smiles. I raise my hand to wave, and she looks straight into my eyes. She holds her soft, sad smile and waves back. Edna crosses her arms along the sill and rests her chin on them. As we stare at one another, her skin begins to shrink and soften; the lines around her eyes thin into the taut skin of her temples. Her cracked, deflated lips moisten and become full. The tangled mess of her hair begins to darken, then the wisps come together to form thick curls that bounce on her shoulders.
A car horn startles me and I turn quickly. One of my neighbours is waiting there in the middle of the street. He glares at me, raises his hands and shrugs. I move to let him pass. He pulls into his driveway and glances over toward my duplex and shakes his head. I look back up at the window, but it’s completely empty.
Today on the radio, they say that the union has walked away from negotiations. The spokeswoman says there is no end in sight. She says that if the city isn’t willing to budge, this thing could go until winter. We’re about to hit week nine now, and the population is straining. There are daily protests at Queen’s Park, people calling for the mayor’s head. Rumours of legislation. Scabs. A man in the east end rented a backhoe and dug up his entire front yard. He filled it with all of his family’s garbage and then covered it. If there wasn’t a strike happening, solid waste management inspectors would have been called, and he might have been charged. As it stands, people are just thinking it sounds like a good idea.
After the news update, the DJ returns and gives an update on the Son of Son of Flying Pig. The pig has been spotted in my neighbourhood again. It’s losing air, flying low and nearing one of the temporary dump sites a few streets over. In an ominous tone, the voice on the radio says that the pig’s flight is becoming potentially dangerous. Authorities have decided that it’s time for action.
The noon GO train roars by behind my house. I glance up as it passes, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I see it: Son of Son of Flying Pig.
Mr. Hamil
ton’s shoes are the closest, so I grab them and pull them on, wincing as the too-tight fabric at the back rubs against the blister on my heel. I slip out from the backyard and head down the street at a brisk pace, following the pig. It has lost a considerable amount of air since I first saw it and looks emaciated now; the XFM logos on the side are crumbling in on themselves. As I walk, I see that others are also following, and still more are standing on their front steps, heads tilted skyward toward the Son of Son of Flying Pig as if this were the actual parade: a single, lonely float dancing wounded in the sky.
And then it’s gone.
There’s a bang that sounds like a gun, and the pig is tumbling rapidly, its body twisting in on itself until it’s out of sight. The people who have been following it speed up and I follow. We round the corner just in time to see the blimp make its final descent. I’m surprised to discover that there are dozens of people watching as the massive deflated pig comes to rest on top of the pile of garbage in the middle of the park. There is an odd silence. Along with the spectators there are police cars, two news vans and still another from the radio station, XFM, yet for a moment no one moves or says anything.
Then, without warning, the deflated rubber carcass of Son of Son of Flying Pig bursts into flames and, within seconds, thick, black smoke fills the sky.
Heather notices the shoes sitting by the front door two days later on her way to work.
“Where did you get those,” she asks and I tell her. “Why do you want to wear them? Christ, Jake, this is just weird.”
“They don’t really fit anyway,” I say. I’m crusty with sleep, standing there in only my boxers. “They gave me blisters.”
“It’s just weird.”
“Look.” I lean against the wall and lift my left foot up, turning it. There’s a torn blister on the back of my heel. Just a flap of dead skin.
She shakes her head and sighs a big frustrated sigh. “It just doesn’t seem right to take a dead man’s shoes.”
“Well, what does he care, anyway?”
She puts her right hand on her hip and tilts her head. She looks sexy when she’s mad because of the way she pouts those fantastic lips. “Maybe you should spend a little more time job searching,” she says.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
She clenches her fingers into fists then stretches them wide.
I smile, hoping to lighten the situation. “Heather, it’s not that bad. I’m just going to throw them out anyway.”
She shakes her head and closes her eyes. “Whatever,” she says. “I’ve got to go.” She turns, opens the door and steps out.
I rush to the bay window in our living room. She’s already in the car. I stare down at her, hoping she’ll look up at me, but then the car rolls to the end of the driveway and she pulls out into the street. I keep waving and stop only when the car is out of sight.
Yet even then I don’t move. I stay and stare out at the houses across from ours, the trees lining the yards, the cars sitting in the driveways, the basketball hoops and the trimmed hedges. I stay there for a long time, beginning to see, with each passing moment, how interesting the world looks from here, framed as it is by the wooden sill around the bay window.
hey hadn’t spoken in a little over an hour when she asked him if they were going to make it.
“I don’t know,” he said, gripping the steering wheel. The road had been the same for the last few hundred kilometres, roughly since they’d managed to find their way out of Edmonton. Northern Alberta had its own stark beauty about it, but, like the rest of the Prairies, it was a beauty that suffered from overexposure: stunning for the first hundred kilometres of open land and farms and yellow fields and cow pastures, but then monotonous after that.
“Is that a rain cloud up there?” she asked. Her elbow rested on the slim lip of the passenger window. Her finger, wedged into her mouth, probed the spaces between her teeth.
“Looks it.” The clouds ahead had formed in a surreal way, as though rising from the landscape to meet the perpetually setting sun.
“Do you think we’ll hit it?”
He shrugged. It felt as if they’d been chasing that sun for hours. Despite all the driving, it had not changed its position. And then a billowing white cloud had risen. Slowly at first, it looked like a mountain in flux, an anomalous geographical event. Darkened as it was by the dusk, it seemed only a silhouette, a massive amoeba-shaped silhouette, churning into itself on the vast Northern Alberta horizon. He liked the look of it, the excitement and danger it threatened.
“We don’t seem to be getting any closer to it.” Her finger fell from her mouth and she clasped her hands on her lap. Her posture was perfect: her back at a perfect ninety-degree angle to her legs.
They’d flown into Calgary on July thirtieth and rented an SUV at the airport. They’d then driven to Edmonton and spent the night there, stocking up on the required provisions before heading north. They were on a strict deadline, wanting to hit the 60th parallel before the first of August, their third wedding anniversary. She was convinced how romantic it would be, how the sun never fully set in the North at this point in the summer. “It would be like our anniversary never ended,” she’d said. “Our whole trip could be one long day.”
They’d left Edmonton early in the morning, the plan being to hit the Northwest Territories sometime in the late evening, allowing them to drive to a campsite along the Hay River and be settled by midnight. Then they got lost. One wrong turn led them deep into the city and their attempts to get out got them caught up in early morning work traffic, which slowly and painfully funnelled them out at the wrong end of the city. Once they got back through the city and on track, they were hours behind. She’d been on the verge of tears since that wrong turn. Pent up and ready to burst, he could see it in that absurd posture, the way she kept bringing her hand to her mouth.
He checked the speedometer. It hovered around 120 and they were making up some ground, but the gas was getting low. They hadn’t seen a gas station in kilometres, since Whitecourt, and he wondered if he should have stopped there.
“What’s the next town?” he asked.
She pulled the map from the glovebox. Navigation was her responsibility, though he wondered if he should have taken over that job after the Edmonton mishap. He could see her out of the corner of his eye studying the map with great precision, her finger tracing lines on the page.
“Where are we now?” she asked.
He looked around and saw farmland stretching as far as the eye could see. The odd patch of trees broke the flatness, but not enough to hide the depth of all that open space. Up ahead the cloud still toiled on the horizon, and the sun held its position in the sky, continuing to inch its way toward the ground.
“I don’t know. On the goddamn highway.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked. “‘On the goddamn highway.’”
He quietly took a deep breath. “I don’t know where we are, sorry. You have the map.”
“We passed Whitecourt, right?”
“Long ago, yes.”
“Well, it doesn’t look like there is anything until Valleyview.” She settled the map on her knees and turned to look at him.
“And?”
“‘And’ what?”
“And what the hell does that mean?”
She remained quiet for a moment. He could feel her staring at him, and he knew she’d have that hurt look in her eyes. He would feel terrible if he saw it.
“I don’t know how far we have to go,” she finally said. The map lay upon her thighs. She turned her head to look out her window. “Maybe fifty, sixty kilometres.”
He kept his eyes on the road. Stared at the cloud and watched in awe as it lit up in a silent flash of lightning. The whole formation, for one brief instant, glowed yellow and became a huge fireball sitting on the road ahead of them. The lightning made it seem bigger and mobile and close. But he didn’t hear any thunder so knew it was far away.
He watch
ed as the needle in the gas gauge slid past the quarter tank mark. He looked up in time to see a set of headlights pass them by. A big truck.
“There were logs on that truck,” she said.
“Yeah?” He hadn’t noticed.
“That must mean something.”
To him it meant that someone was trying to strip this bleak, desolate land of its one final refuge from flat monotony. There was nothing in his life that could have prepared him for this landscape. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, the only time he’d ever left BC was to go to university in Halifax. He’d been surrounded by mountains and the ocean for his whole life.
“Why do you think it’s so different?” She didn’t even turn her head, just kept staring out her window.
“What’s different?”
“All this land. How is it so different from the ocean?”
It struck him that they’d been thinking the same thing. It unnerved him when they did that. He often wondered whether it meant they were compatible or had just spent too much time together. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
“It should really be the same, right?” She too had grown up on the coast, in Vancouver though, tucked away from the open ocean, hidden by Vancouver Island.
“Why should it be?”
“It’s just open space. Flat, unchanging, open space.” Her voice drifted as though just becoming aware of the landscape they were passing through.
