The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  So I know how it worked for Sylvie — and I know exactly when it happened for her.

  Sylvie used to begin the story on the Saturday just before they got stuck. She had wandered off on her own across a marsh (in her hip waders, natch) because she had grown tired of Gord talking all the time and telling her what to do and then always taking the shot before she could. (“I just get so excited,” he’d apologize afterward.) So she wandered off on her own, not too far, she promised the guides, and sat for a while in a clearing on the other side of the marsh, kept just cool enough — even in her heavy waders and long underwear — by the relentless, whipping wind, and just warm enough thanks to the blazing October sunshine settling across her skin like a cat across a lap.

  Wilderness. Sylvie in the wild, hat pulled down, wind in her ears. I like to picture her like that. She stayed there for the next hour, she told me, because it was so peaceful. She got one goose — it practically landed at her feet — and then another, which plopped into the middle of the marsh. Well it was time to get going anyway. She felt the freezing water strain against the rubber of her waders, hugging her legs like pleading children, as she sloshed forward to get the second goose.

  But just a few steps in, something bucked at her side, almost throwing her off balance and into the drink. It was goose number one, still kicking at life.

  Criss! she yelped, grabbing at it.

  But goose number one had no interest in being groped. Goose number one had come to, discovered itself to be gut-shot, dangling from some Frenchwoman’s scrawny shoulder, and was entirely taken aback. It made its feelings known to my mother.

  She sloshed her way back to solid ground holding the thrashing goose out in front of her, barely able to keep it still.

  For all her experience in the bush, this had never happened before. Usually when Sylvie made a creature dead, it could be counted upon to stay that way. Not this guy, though. Reason being, Adam: this was a gift from the above-mentioned gods — a honking, feathery thunderbolt, if you will. Celestial provocation.

  “I was gonna have to break his neck,” Sylvie related to me whenever she got to this point in the story. “I thought to myself, Câline de bine, I’m gonna have to break his neck.”

  There was always something poignant about my mother’s bestowal of gender upon the goose (in which case I guess I should say gander). You might think this was her French-speaker’s habit of sexing every noun — but Sylvie had spoken English right alongside of French her whole life and never had that habit. I believe it was just my mother’s way of getting across the intimacy of that moment. The fact that she had found herself confronted with a being, an individual — how else to put it: a dude. A dude whose outraged, flappy-winged life she needed to extinguish then and there. There was no way she could make it back across the marsh with a thrashing goose in tow.

  So she began to throttle the goose.

  Creak! Went the divine Barcaloungers, shifting forward in unison.

  I remember her first telling me this story when I was ten or so, and I remember feeling at this point in the narrative exactly what I’m feeling now, as I tell it to you. A dread. A kind of teetering feeling, like a car halfway over a cliff.

  “But I couldn’t choke him.”

  What do you mean you couldn’t choke him? You felt bad? You showed it mercy?

  “No I mean he just . . . wouldn’t choke.”

  It wouldn’t die! Sylvie throttled and throttled the snowy bastard, and still it kicked, still it thrashed. Let it be known: this was one hell of a goose. I mean have you ever seen the necks on those things? They may as well have been designed with ready-made finger-welts, they’re so chokeable.

  So Sylvie knelt down on the ground, the better to throttle her goose. She squeezed and shook and strangled, for god knows how long.

  “And he just wouldn’t choke!” ends this part of the story.

  Now there are a few things I don’t understand here. Premier among them, of course, being why wouldn’t the dude choke? Even putting that aside: I mean, my god, Sylvie could’ve simply twisted the thing’s head around a few times like a bottle cap, couldn’t she? I’m sorry if that sounds horrible, but this is life and death. She does not want the goose to be alive at this moment, she wants it to be dead, and when you want something to be dead, I would think, you have to be prepared to get a little extreme. Playtime, as they say, is over.

  So what did Sylvie do next?

  “I thought: I better kneel on him.”

  Mom! You knelt on the goose?

  “I tried to, like, kneel his breath out of him.”

  Adam, do you see how this is horrible? Sylvie in the wilderness, the wind off the bay, the silence in the wind, the struggling goose, the living goose, shot out of the sky, my mother and the thrashing goose, throttling the goose, strangling the goose, the wind in her ears, in its feathers, kneeling, at last, the better to throttle, the continued thrashing of goose, the endless moment of no-death, no end in sight, the angelic wings, spreading and contracting, spreading and contracting.

  The goose does not want to go down.

  So Sylvie knelt on it.

  Sylvie (I thought at ten, and ever since), don’t do it. Don’t kneel on the dude.

  She knelt on it a nice long time. Who knows how long. Until the goose was finally good and dead.

  Then she picked it up, flung it back over her shoulder, and waded to the other side of the marsh, where my father stood waiting.

  8

  06/27/09, 2:04 p.m.

  SORRY IT HAS BEEN so long. Or maybe you don’t care — I can’t help but notice Chub Central continues to maintain its radio silence. The old ignore-him-and-he’ll-go-away tactic I suppose? Well guess what, Adam, I’ve done more than my share of market research on that one, and I’m here to tell you: he doesn’t. He won’t.

  You’re not going to believe this but I called Gord the other day. I was feeling a little stalled since last we spoke. That goose always takes it out of me. I had to hit the couch for a while. I lay there for a good couple of days asking myself if it was really such a great idea to set aside my summer vacation for this. If this is really what I want to spend the next two months gnawing away at. Usually, I’ll take on some project or another. I’ll work on the house or volunteer at the Y to do some coaching. Not hockey, if that’s your assumption. The kids are all about soccer these days. Hockey’s time, it seems to me, has come and gone. The players stopped seeming like demi-gods around the time they started seeming more like rich, whiny babies, and the playoffs have been depressing pretty much since Gretzky left for L.A., and most kids’ parents can’t afford all that gear anyway.

  Fortunately and speaking of which, the Confederations Cup is on the sports channel, so it wasn’t like I just spent two days staring at the ceiling. I first started watching soccer back when I started coaching — teaching myself about the game and figuring out how to give a shit about it — and now I look forward to the soccer finals more than I ever did Lord Stanley’s bashfest. I happen to live in a neighbourhood with a pretty big Greek contingent and they always go bananas at this time of year. I can wander from one block party to the next, being handed napkinfuls of baklava and shots of ouzo with every step I take. When Greece won the Euro Cup a few years back, there was literally dancing in my street — the party went on for days. (Oh and I’m not going to get any more specific than that about where I live, by the way, because I could be anywhere, Adam. I’m a ghost, after all. Maybe I’m on the other side of the continent from you. On the other hand, maybe I could get up out of my chair right now, take a stroll a few blocks over, and knock on your door. Who knows, right? Not you.)

  So anyway, right around the time Italy was going up against Brazil I started thinking about Gord and how disgusted he would be; how he always hated soccer because Europeans played it and Europeans are by definition homosexuals, even though the Russians have proven themselves able to play hockey every once in a while like respectable hetero males. And then I found myself snick
ering up at the ceiling thinking how fun it would be to call Gord up and tell him that I was watching soccer on TV and describe to him how much I was enjoying it, especially that one player with the flowing chestnut hair and taut buttocks.

  So one day, after a great many beer, I did.

  When I drink a great many beer, you have to understand, I soften up a little about Gord. That is to say, I go from my sober default setting of wanting to never look at or speak to him again, to my great-many-beer status of wanting to call him up and provoke him.

  “How’s it going, fucknuts?”

  “Well piss on a plate! Is that who I think it is?”

  “It is who you think it be.”

  “Well isn’t this a surprise. Stay right there now son and let me turn off the TV.”

  That’s when I lost a bit of my great-many-beer glow, realizing at once how happy I’d made Gord with my phone call, realizing I was actually sitting there on the line waiting for him to come back and talk to me.

  So I hung up.

  But of course he called me immediately back.

  “Guess we got cut off there.”

  “Guess so.”

  “These goddamn phones! They make you buy new packages every year that are supposed to save you so much trouble for more money and the service just gets worse and worse.”

  “They make you buy them, do they.”

  “Well they don’t give you any goddamn choice. This young one called me up the other day, some kinda accent on her, I can understand maybe every third word, Oh we’re offering this new service . . . ”

  “Just hang up on them, Gord.”

  “Well I would but I’m too polite. So I say maybe one of you assholes can tell me why every time I pick up the line now the goddamn thing goes boop boop boop like a busy signal?”

  “It means you have a message, Gord. It’s like an answering machine.”

  “What’s like an answering machine?”

  “Like — an answering machine that’s inside your phone. They gave you voice-mail on your line — it’s internal voice-mail.”

  “Well that’s dandy but who said I wanted any goddamn voice-mail, internal or external? I get my mail in an envelope, and it goes in my mailbox, and that’s all the internal mail I need. Then I take it out and, by Christ, it’s external. Whoopee-ding, aren’t I high-tech.”

  I could tell by the tone of his voice, by the sprightly lilt to his goddamns, that my father was thrilled to be speaking with me.

  “Hey Gord, guess what? I’m watching the Confederations Cup on TV. Big soccer finals.”

  “Is that a fact? Watching a bunch of fruits run around in their shorts now, are you?”

  “Sure am.”

  “Well to each his own. Live and let live I always say. Just as long as you keep those types away from me.”

  “It’s not gonna be easy Gord. You’re a good-looking man.”

  “Oh kiss my ass.”

  “Don’t say that to them.”

  Gord wheezed himself a scrawny chestful of laughter at that one. Ah, father-son queer bashing. How did I get into this?

  “Hey Gord?” I called over his delighted gasps for breath. “Listen, I gotta go.”

  “No you don’t, you just got on for Christ’s sake,” he said, hacking up the results of his laughter — into a Kleenex, I hoped. “You didn’t call just to tell me you’re sitting there watching fruits in shorts.”

  “Actually I did.”

  “Well I hope you have more than that to say for yourself these days.”

  And then I thought: Oh well. Gord’s not good for much, but he does constitute a living archive of sorts — which, as I think I’ve already indicated, is why I’ve avoided him most of my adult life. But undertaking this little project with you, I suddenly realized, was going to require a complete readjustment of my lifelong MO.

  So what the heck, I thought, time to open up the archive.

  Was this a bad idea? Yes. Did I open, and swiftly down, another beer precisely to drown out the clamouring voices of my better, smarter angels, who were telling me this was a bad idea? Yes.

  “Gord,” I said. “Hey Gord. Do you remember when I almost killed Mick Croft?”

  And Gord — you’re not going to believe this — he was ready for it. It’s like he had spent the past twenty-odd years like a runner, coiled on the starting block, poised for the pistol.

  “That little fucker,” Gord began. “I will tell you something right now, son of mine. That little fucker was looking to get his head kicked in pretty much the moment he poked it out of his mother’s you-know-what. And now I’m going to tell you something else. You didn’t almost kill him, that’s bullshit. It was self-defence and everyone in this town knows it, and has known it, for the past twenty-three years.”

  My god. Gord had kept count.

  “We did this town a favour, you and me. We were the fucking clean-up squad. Bill Hamm and his keystone cops up there at the detachment couldn’t do anything about it, but oh my Christ, they sure as hell could come after me and mine once we finished doing their goddamn job for them, couldn’t they?”

  “Me, Gord,” I said, spastically thrusting my hand into the beer cooler I’d stationed by the couch when the Cup began. But all I got this time was a fistful of ice. “You were in the restaurant. You were on the other side of the glass from where I was.”

  But Gord was off. Gord had been coiled and ready too long to slow down now.

  “Almost killed the little bastard — if only! How many kids did he almost kill pushing his drugs? Not to mention that knife he was always carrying around for the love of god and everyone and their cousin’s dog saw it. All those half-drunk tools over at the Legion. If that useless lawyer had any kind of clue what she was doing we wouldn’t have . . . ”

  I was just digging around in the ice at that point, had been this whole time, my hand was going numb. And I knew I couldn’t do this.

  “Me, Gord,” I said. “You’re all: we we we.”

  “Wee wee wee all the way home,” rejoined Gord. “Listen here, son. You did nothing wrong and I will go to my grave with those words on my lips, Gordie, that you can believe.”

  “It’s everyone else’s fault, right? The lawyer, the tools at the Legion . . .”

  “It was his own goddamn fault! Are you gonna sit there and tell me different? Oh, he had a hard childhood, is that it? Oh boo-hoo, maybe his old man gave him a tap with the hairbrush every once in a while. Oh no, they fed him too much red meat. They didn’t buy him fancy sneakers, wouldn’t get a big screen TV for his bedroom. My god, when you think of it, they should have named a holiday after the little asshole.”

  “FUCK, GORD!” I roared into the phone.

  “DON’T YOU CURSE AT ME!” he roared back. And here we were at last. “YOU’RE NOT TOO BIG FOR ME TO . . .”

  “YES I AM TOO BIG! JESUS! STOP BEING SUCH AN IDIOT! I’M JUST TRYING TO HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH YOU!”

  “Well who’s stopping you?” Now he just sounded perplexed. Oh, I remembered this tactic from long ago and far away. Gord switches tracks — shifts with stomach-turning swiftness from wrath to bewilderment. Who, me? Lovable old Dad, screaming, making threats? You’re mistaken, sir. And then you hear yourself panting and feel your face throb as you make rigid your neck tendons in preparation to holler some more at the poor, bewildered old man.

  “I knew calling you would ruin my day,” I told him after a while. “You’re a lunatic, Dad.”

  “Well you know I always love to hear from you, Gordie.”

  And can you believe this, Adam? He was being utterly sincere. Utterly proving my point.

  Brazil won, by the way.

  9

  07/01/09, 10:57 a.m.

  WHAT YOU CAN'T ACCOUNT for, when you punch a person in the head, is how they are going to land. You can be as careful as you like. You can account for the fact that the man in front of you is a small man and you are a large man. You can pull your punches, always keeping in mind, however, that the s
mall man is known to enjoy knives so it would be best for all concerned if you laid him out quickly and more or less completely. Also keeping an eye on the surrounding skeezer cohort, any one of whom may hurl themselves at you in wounded outrage the moment their beloved Mickster loses steam. So a single, decisive shot to the head is what’s required here. We want the Mickster down and out. We don’t want him reaching into his back pocket, signalling to one of his generals. We don’t want to prolong this process long enough, say, for Collie Chaisson to dash over to use the payphone at the Legion, give Mick’s friend Jeeves a call for example. We don’t want reinforcements, please god. The wrath of bikers, raining down on Icy Dream.

  So we get this over with. And we don’t, we absolutely do not, give the little man bouncing around behind the glass his fun. We give him as little fun as possible — that is our eternal goal. Ditto the alky losers on the other side of the parking lot, hanging off one another in the doorway of the Legion, brandishing beers and smokes like cheerleaders’ pompoms.

  The story of how we got to this point is stupid and — this is funny to say considering the freight-load of consequence it produced — inconsequential. That is to say, it doesn’t really matter how we got to this point. The point itself is what matters, the point of fist into face followed hard upon by head into pavement. The story leading up to that point is a story that could’ve lead up to nothing, or anything. It could’ve led up to me saying, “Croft, dude, buddy, seriously. Don’t pass around a hash pipe in our parking lot.” And Croft’s blue eyes lighting up with friendship and understanding. “Dude! For you? Anything.” And he and the boys restuff themselves into Croft’s toylike Ford Escort and away they trundle off to the drug den on Howe Street there to smoke and drink, crank the amps and play “Smoke on the Water” ’til their fingers tear open. That could just as easily have happened. I was a preferred customer after all. But no. Why? Guess why. Right.