by Mark Sampson
He could. Donald was working an early shift and could grab an afternoon GO Train when he was done. By the time he got back, Celine would have already left for the library. So he set it up with the taxidermist. When he hung up the phone, Donald looked down at the desk. “Thumper, don’t chew on Celine’s notes,” he scolded, though made no effort to stop him.
In Pickering, the guy’s workshop, as expected, was a frenzied diorama of various animals in suspended poses. Donald introduced himself and set his knapsack on the cement floor to unzip it. He pulled out the hawk, freed it from the garbage bag, and handed it over. The taxidermist took a moment to molest the bird, examining its neck and jostling its talons and running his thick grey thumbs through its plumage.
“Six months. Seven hundred dollars,” he said.
A bargain, Donald thought. It wasn’t even going to cut into their savings that much. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Only, when it’s ready for pickup, can you email me instead of calling?”
“Ah, you’re married,” the taxidermist replied, nodding like he understood.
~
The entire neighbourhood had been on the lookout for the home invader, for months. A middle-aged man kept breaking into houses in their suburb and sexually assaulting the women inside. He was getting increasingly brazen about it, and the neighbourhood women discussed their fears and outrage in their yoga classes and at their book clubs. Donald and his man friends had talked about what they would do if they ever found the perp: If we catch that guy, they’d say, if we fucking catch that guy . . . and Celine would finish their sentences, You’d call the police, right? Don, tell me you’d call the police. They already know who this fucker is. Just call the cops and be done with it. But the cops, thus far, had had no luck catching him.
Donald had caught him. The two men were writhing in a tangle of limbs in the snow as Celine hovered over them with the cordless phone, screaming the nature of her emergency at the 911 operator. The operator was screaming back at Celine to “stay on the phone, ma’am, just stay on the phone.” And she would have, too, had she not spotted Thumper peeping his little head out the open back door. He lunged forward, stealing along the foundation and looking to round the corner toward the open driveway.
“The cat!” Celine yelled, pulling the phone away from her face. “The cat’s getting out!”
Donald leaped to his feet then, giving the home invader a chance to clamber up and make a break for it. Thumper tried to slink past, but Donald braced him round his furry belly with both hands and tossed him, like a rugby ball, to Celine. Then he was dashing down the icy driveway after the home invader with Celine in pursuit, the phone in one hand and the cat in the other. They saw an old Tercel—the home invader’s car, apparently—parked on the street. Despite the cold night, its passenger-side window was down. The home invader jumped into it legs first, Dukes of Hazzard style, and crawled into the driver’s seat.
“Get the licence plate,” Celine yelled. “Don, get the licence plate.”
But it was too late. Her husband was already in the air, diving headlong through the open passenger window. He was half in and half out of the car just as the home invader gunned the engine and spun away.
~
The taxidermist finally emailed—Your bird is ready for pickup—and Donald hired a Zip car to get out to Pickering. What else could he do? He certainly couldn’t bring a taxidermied hawk onto the GO Train. Plus, he was now back on evening shifts and by the time he finished work, the taxidermist would be closed. The scope of what he had done—what he was about to bring in to their 450-square-foot Parkdale apartment—slowly dawned on him on that long drive out to Pickering. But any fears he had about Celine’s reaction were washed away by the sight of the finished product. The taxidermist presented the hawk to Donald as the work of art it was: wings up and spread wide; beak open and screeching fury upon its prey; talons clasping the wooden branch in a death grip. The bird was forever frozen in a moment of sheer awesomeness.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
Celine’s reaction was even worse than he expected when, an hour later, he steered the hawk into their apartment. “Donwhatthefuckisthat!” she screamed, flinching out of her desk chair as if someone had doused her with hot tea. Donald’s words tripped over themselves as he recited the whole story to her—the train, the plow, the stashing of the hawk in his locker—and the captivation the bird held over him. But each sentence made Celine’s face crumble more and more with horror. When he told her what he had paid to have the bird stuffed, she exploded. “So essentially what we have here, Don, is a seven hundred dollar cat toy! Where exactly are you planning to store this monstrosity?”
“Look, can we talk about this later? I really should return the rental car.”
“You rented a car?”
They argued into the afternoon. Celine posited several solutions—throw the hawk in the trash and eat the loss; sell the thing on eBay; return it to the taxidermist and get some of their money back—but Donald said no. He said the bird was staying and that was that. They finally reached a détente: he could keep it behind locked doors in the glass hutch cabinet (a wedding gift from his parents) that stood in the corner of their dining area, so Thumper wouldn’t get at it. The hawk would stay there, they agreed, for now.
“For now,” said Donald.
“For now,” said Celine. “Until you come to your senses and throw that thing out.”
He shook his head. “No. ‘For now’ meaning the hawk shouldn’t be locked up like that, Celine. It should be free. ‘For now’ meaning this is only a temporary solution, until we buy a house and I get a room of my own.” He nodded, almost to himself. “Yeah, it can stay behind glass until I get a man room.”
“Go put your uniform on,” she said, and without looking at her watch, added, “You’re going to be late, if you plan to return that car.”
Three months later, Celine successfully defended her dissertation, but of course there were no academic jobs. After several semesters of shitty sessional teaching, she bit the bullet and started applying to the private sector. She soon landed a position as a communications specialist with a medical research company. At first she grumbled to Donald about the 9-to-5 grind, but then started to like it. She was delighted when, just six months in, she got promoted to manager, and all of sudden they had real money for the first time in their marriage.
Donald, meanwhile, had a rougher go of things at Union Station. He got laid off for the slow winter months, then hired back and, inexplicably, given a small promotion, a bump in pay and less shift work. During his time off, he had sat brooding in their Parkdale apartment, arguing with himself about whether to go back to school and finish his degree. He waffled about it as the hawk looked on from its glass shelf in the hutch. Despite Donald’s glum ruminations, he found the hawk’s presence inspiring, like the kitty on the poster that says Hang in there! He was about to make a decision, once and for all, but then got called back by VIA Rail; and with the promotion they offered, it felt like the choice had been made for him. He made sure to convey the news to Celine in a tone of solemnity.
“Look, I know you hate it there,” she said. “I know you don’t want to haul luggage for the rest of your life. But we have a real chance to pull ourselves together financially. I say we work like dogs for a year, save up for down payment on a condo, then reevaluate our situation.”
Donald agreed, mostly because he couldn’t think of a good reason not to.
A year later they opened the door on their new condo, a glass box on the 26TH floor of a building just north of Bloor Street. The floor-to-ceiling windows provided them with a splendid view of the east end’s rolling trees and grim apartment complexes in the distance. Their galley kitchen was small but had a beautiful marble-topped counter. Best of all, the place had two bedrooms—one at either end of the condo. Donald set the hawk up in the smaller of the two, atop their recently acquired IKEA
shelf where there was just enough room between it and the ceiling for the bird’s imposing wingspan.
“My man room,” he said.
“In your dreams,” Celine said. “Don, this is a spare bedroom, for when we have company. And when we don’t have company, we’ll share it as an office.”
Nuts to that, Donald thought, and went about making further claims on the room. He hung a Futurama poster on the wall, the smash-mouth visage of Bender in mid rant; and when a musician friend brought Donald back a tankard after touring Germany, he put that on the IKEA shelf too. He figured: Celine already has an office, at work. A rather nice one.
The next year, VIA Rail once again laid Donald off for the winter. He took it as good news. This time, he thought, I’m going to use these weeks to really figure myself out. Stop procrastinating. Make a decision about school. Come next September I want to be back in the classroom, no exceptions. And he would have done this too, had Celine not started waking up early in the mornings to puke. She went to the doctor and was, to Donald’s surprise, overjoyed with the diagnosis.
“This is huge,” she said, a little weepy. “I mean, I didn’t realize I even wanted this until it happened.” When she saw his face darken, she assumed it was concern over his layoff. She squeezed him by the wrist. “Don’t worry, I get excellent mat leave benefits. We’ll be fine.” Her smile widened. “We—we’re going to need a house.” And the shadow over Donald’s face darkened even more.
~
She was running back up the driveway now, screaming. The cordless phone had lost the connection to its docking station, the 911 operator disappearing into the ether. Celine stumbled through the back door, secured Thumper in the laundry room, then tossed the dead cordless onto an end table. She went over and ripped the baby out of his playpen, clamped his bum in the crook of her arm. Looked around, looked around, found a pair of shoes with good grips, stepped into them. Where’s the cell phone? She checked the desk where the Christmas lights were. She checked her pockets. No. Don must have it on him. They always shared the cell phone.
Up the stairs. Throw a jacket on the baby, throw a jacket on yourself. Then out the front door this time, scramble down the lawn. Continue to scream. Continue to scream. She saw the neighbours’ porch lights come on and heard dogs barking, just like in the movies. People were coming out to see what all the ruckus was. She was screaming The home invader has my husband! The home invader has my husband! How far could they have gotten—two blocks, maybe three? She could see the Tercel’s tire tracks in the snow, weaving all over the sidewalk, up onto people’s lawns and back again. She followed them down the street.
~
Donald agreed to wear the Snugli, but not while in the Man Room. He wore it in the malls and in the supermarket when they went shopping, in the aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond. He wore it at neighbourhood barbecues they were invited to, where the women fussed over pasta salads and the men drank light beer. He wore it at Walmart. He wore it to Celine’s company picnic. He wore it when they went to the park. If Donald was honest with himself, he’d admit that he actually loved having the baby’s body close to his own in this way—plump legs drooping and tiny arms curled up like bass clefs. It was only when the baby started nuzzling at his nipples did he think to give Celine a turn.
But despite all that, he would not wear the Snugli in the Man Room—even when he had to vacuum in there. The Man Room was for being a man. He had expanded it since they had bought the house. The hawk was still on the IKEA shelf, as was the tankard, and the Futurama poster was still on the wall. Other items had joined them. There was now a liquor cabinet full of dusty Scotch bottles and barely potable liqueurs. There was a small TV against one wall with an Xbox hooked up to it. There were bar stools and a little fridge stocked with craft beer. There was a leather couch (actually a love seat, though Donald didn’t call it that) and his wingback. There was a huge silver helmet from a knight’s suit of armour, standing upright on the IKEA shelf directly below the hawk. And on the shelf below that, on the opposite side, was a grenade with the ordnance taken out of it.
Donald would often have his man friends over to the Man Room. They would drink craft beer and play Xbox and talk about man things. Sometimes that meant their jobs, if they had them. Donald still had his, at Union Station, though the commute was killing him now. Some of the men didn’t have jobs, or not good ones. Ponytailed Jake had a masters in early childhood education, but after four years on the supply list he had given up hope of ever finding permanent work. He was back taking shifts at the pub that financed most of his education. (“If I can’t be around kids,” he said, “at least I can be around drunks.”) Grilse had been in the military—he was the one who gave Donald the grenade, as a gift; not for his birthday or anything, just randomly, at a house party. (“Here, have a grenade. Don’t worry, I took the ordnance out of it.”) But Grilse found that his army specialties, reconnaissance and artillery maintenance and so forth, didn’t count for a whole lot in the civilian world. He worked for a while as a corrections officer but then lost his job when the prison got outsourced to the private sector. Grilse didn’t get on with new management because Grilse was still suffering from a touch of PTSD, after his tour of Afghanistan. And then there was Rocco, the musician who had given Donald the tankard. His band had broken up and he was now trying to land work as a recording engineer, but found himself competing with younger blood who had “grown up digital.” When Rocco was in the Man Room, he would pick up the grenade and say, “This is so cool.” And when Grilse was in the Man Room, he would pick up the tankard and say, “This is so cool.” And when they were all in the Man Room together, the boys would look up at the hawk and say, “That thing is so cool,” and Donald would be pleased.
They spent a lot of time in the Man Room, especially during the long winter months when Donald was laid off. The boys would spend hours talking about their jobs or other things, things they didn’t get a chance to talk about if their women were around. Like politics. You couldn’t bring up politics if Celine was in the room; she’d roll her eyes and make sure everyone knew how boring she found the subject. Or UFC. They never talked UFC if the women were around. Or their futures. Especially their futures. The boys still talked about all that, what they would and should do, the indeterminate life choices they might yet one day make—but never in front of their women. The boys knew that they were only imagining what they could read in their wives’ or girlfriends’ eyes, but it was no less real for them: What are you guys talking about? the looks and glares said, the sudden silences. This is the future. The future is right now.
How true that was. Donald wasn’t sure when the shift had happened, when the present stopped existing altogether. His days now felt part of some queer, futuristic novel. He couldn’t peg himself unhappy with his present situation; only that it didn’t feel like the present at all. It felt like an eternal future, like he woke up every morning transported in a time machine to some far-flung circumstance that he couldn’t have imagined when he was younger. And even the things he had not yet done felt like part of a past that had come and gone. Like going back to school. Like finishing his degree and figuring out what he really wanted to do. Or getting Celine pregnant again. He wanted to have a second child, he did. He does. See—present and past and future, all fucked up. And yet Celine had—has—kiboshed the idea. She wanted one and only one child and made that clear to him, even though they had never discussed it, not once. How did she do that?
Only in the Man Room did these feelings abate a little. Only under the suspended pose of the hawk did life feel even marginally in sync with itself. Maybe he did live in some dystopian future. The morning commute down to Union—subway choked with elbows and iPhones and a clammy, collective acquiescence to fate—confirmed it, but so too did the grey winter months when he had nowhere to go at all. Or maybe this was his best possible future—this house, this child, this wife—and he had to accept his place in its perpetual motion mac
hine. He would look up at the hawk, forever immobilized in that moment of fury and flight, and he would ask these questions. He would. He would.
What else could he do?
~
Celine switched her screams to No! No! No! when she saw that the Tercel had jumped the guardrail at the park and hit a picnic table. Both doors were left open, like splayed wings, and two sets of tracks scrambled around the front and then went off together across the snowy expanse. She followed them, the baby bouncing in her arm, the tears and snot freezing on her face. Along the park’s horizons, she thought she glimpsed human silhouettes descending the hills from the backyards that surrounded her. The whole neighbourhood seemed awakened to her distress now.
She followed the tracks deeper into the park. How long had she been running? It felt like hours. There was only one way this night could end, she thought: with her finding Donald face down on the ground with his throat slit, the blood forming a giant Rorschach Test in the snow. She would shield the baby’s eyes from it so he wouldn’t have to see.
She practically tripped over them. It was like a dream, what she came upon. Not just Donald and the home invader, but an entire pile of men right in the middle of the park. The home invader was flailing on the bottom, his chest and legs crushed into the snow. On top of him was Grilse, who managed to pin the home invader’s arms behind his back and was putting the brunt of his weight onto him. Then there was Rocco, spread-eagled across Grilse’s wide shoulders. Next came Jake, crossed over Rocco going the other way. And then finally Donald, sitting on top of them all like the king of the castle, cell phone open and on the line with another 911 operator. It was only then that Celine noticed the sound of sirens in the distance. Other people were working their way over through the snow—wives, elderly couples, teenagers. Everyone coming to see what these men had done.
