Tilt

by Alan Cumyn

  TILT

  Alan Cumyn

  GROUNDWOOD BOOKS

  HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS

  TORONTO BERKELEY

  Copyright © 2011 by Alan Cumyn

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2011 by

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.groundwoodbooks.com

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Cumyn, Alan

  Tilt / Alan Cumyn.

  eISBN 978-1-55498-173-1

  I. Title.

  PS8555.U489T54 2011 jC813'.54 C2011-902085-8

  Cover photograph by Media Bakery

  Design by Michael Solomon

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For Suzanne

  1

  The new girl came upon him unexpectedly. He was alone in the dark parking lot behind the auto-glass shop where nobody went at night except for him. It was hard to explain what he was doing. He was developing a twisting kick that involved heaving himself into the air with a broom handle. The kick part was coming along, but the landing needed work.

  He was picking little asphalt bits out of his knee when she happened by.

  “Hey,” she said, not the least bit startled. Perhaps she hadn’t seen the kick. Still, he was a male in a shadowy back alley developing his own secret martial art, and many girls would have been frightened out of their boots.

  She wasn’t wearing boots. She was wearing flip-flops that went thwack thwack with every step, and a pair of ordinary jeans and a light windbreaker. She was taller than him and big-shouldered. Her hair stood up at odd angles as if she hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours and had then been electrocuted. It was red tonight, as far as he could see.

  Janine. Janine Igwash.

  Janine Igwash walked straight past him, then climbed the fence, which was eight feet high and topped with rusted barbed wire. No hesitation, gone so fast he wondered if he hadn’t simply imagined her. Yet another absurdity of being sixteen. New girls bigger than him with weird hair appeared in the darkness and slithered up fences like feral ghosts.

  He liked the sound of that: feral ghosts. What did it mean? He took out his notebook and wrote in the darkness, she grazed my spine like a feral ghost.

  Maybe the beginning of a poem? He flipped back a page to the perfect jump shot begins in the soul/sole. He could just read it by the dull light from the back wall of the auto-glass.

  He imagined Janine Igwash walking past him again, only this time he was reading from his notebook. And instead of saying, “Hey,” she said, “What’s that?” Then he looked up at her coolly and said, “I keep track of my thoughts from time to time.” Then she sat cross-legged beside him and he read to her snippets of his thoughts such as the one about the jump shot. And she said, “Really?” As if she’d never thought of it that way. And why would she have?

  “My name is Stan,” he said to her in this revised version happening in his head. “Most of the kids in school, they call me Stanley, but really it’s Stan. I was the final man cut from the JV squad last year but this year I’m going to be a starter.”

  He got up then, picked up the basketball he had left in the shadows, bounced it twice then launched a beautiful arcing shot at the hoop he’d personally nailed, with backboard, to the old pine tree leaning up against the fence. Swish.

  Out loud, to no one, to the feral ghost of Janine Igwash, he said, “With shots like that, I am going to be a starter.”

  Then he limped over to the spot on the fence where the girl had disappeared just minutes before. He pulled himself up the chain link. There was even a space in the rusty barbed wire that he could see would be almost easy to slither through. He peered into the darkness through the leaves.

  She had just arrived late last year. It must have been hard for her coming into the school knowing nobody. Especially with a name like Igwash.

  He was gazing across a backyard. Janine’s? A light snapped on in an upstairs bedroom. Someone’s shadow against the curtains. Spiky hair. Maybe she was about to undress, her silhouette black against the white screen. It was hard to see through the leaves, but it sure looked like she was tugging at her shirt.

  He climbed down. His knee felt better. He snapped a few high kicks without the broom handle, then punched the air six times rapid-fire, a quick exhalation with each strike. Then he retrieved the basketball again and let loose a turnaround jumper without looking, entirely by feel. The ball hit the back of the rim, then the front, then the back, then spun out and bounced, the sound echoing down the dark alley.

  The perfect jump shot begins in the soles of the feet. It moves like a wave through the calves and the thighs up to the hips and along the spine to the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand and out the fingertips, a natural stroke as at ease in the universe as an ocean wave that curls and falls. Easier than breathing. Truer than thought.

  Stan liked that. Truer than thought. He bounced the ball seven more times, pounding a single word into his brain — starter, starter, starter — then glanced again through the darkness at what he thought might be Janine Igwash’s bedroom window.

  —

  Home in darkness. Stan turned on the porch light as he slid past the squeaky screen door.

  “Mom?” He kicked off his sneakers, left them with his basketball and broomstick in the hall closet. The kitchen was dark, too. “Mom?”

  She was sitting in the den with three remotes on her lap and a glass of wine on the telephone table. The TV was dark. As soon as he entered, she thrust the remotes aside and picked up her wine glass. A binder lay open at her feet and the room smelled like work — like the worry of it.

  She snapped it shut, as if she didn’t want him to see something.

  Budget Contingencies, the binder said.

  “These two,” Stan said, picking up the gray remote and the fat black one, “you never need to touch. Just leave them in the cabinet. Maybe I should label them?”

  “How was your day, sweetie?” The red wine left a small line on top of her lipstick that he wished she would wipe off.

  “The only one you need to use is this one.” He held the skinny gray remote in front of her eyes at a reasonable focal distance. “And the only button you need to press is this one.” He showed her the AUX button. Then he pressed it. Nothing. “Unless somebody has been hitting buttons randomly. Then you have to press the Satellite button.”

  She pretended to be watching. “Did you get something to eat?”

  “I had the chicken salad, and I fed Lily, too. This button here. It says ‘satellite.’ We only have to press that once in our lives, then never again. The remote remembers.”

  His mother picked up the binder and began to flip through densely printed pages.

  “The remote remembers,” he said again, in case it might make a difference. He pressed the Auxiliary button and the TV sprang to life. A couple danced frantically in feathered spandex.

  “There’s nothing on anyway,” she said. “I was just waiting for
Gary.”

  Gary, Gary, Gary. Stan turned off the dancers. He picked up the two extra remotes and put them in the back of the TV cabinet.

  “Is he coming over or something?” It was hard to keep the curdle from his voice.

  “He said he was going to call. I’m not going out. I have an eight o’clock tomorrow morning.” Stan’s mother finished her wine and sat in her very still way, as if inviting the mossy green of the sofa to slowly take her over. Her hand remained on the binder, but her eyes were glassy with fatigue.

  Stan walked into the kitchen and performed his own meditation in front of the open fridge. The carton of organic grapefruit juice stared back. He pulled it out and looked for a date: 26 Sep. No wonder it had tasted fuzzy that morning.

  Water at the tap. Stan twisted to drink. When he straightened up, his mother’s phone rang.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Stan heard her say from the other room in that girly voice she only used when talking to Gary.

  Up the stairs. Stan practiced walking with his weight channeled to the outside of each foot to transfer the force of every step smoothly, like a soundless wave. Step number five was impossibly squeaky. But if the footfall were in the exact resonance of the loose board . . .

  “Well, you always have the same idea,” his mother said downstairs.

  Into Lily’s room. The floor too had a resonance he tried to feel with his feet. Little girl sleeping, her wild hair everywhere on the pillow. She was clutching Mr. Strawberry by the neck and already clenching her jaw.

  Stan turned out her light and she opened her eyes.

  “Is Mommy going out?”

  “No. Did you have a pee?”

  “Did she tell you she wasn’t going out?”

  “I want you to have a pee.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “Yes, you do. Get up.” Stan pulled at her wrist. She hit him feebly on the arm with Mr. Strawberry.

  He marched her into their mother’s bathroom. It still reeked of Chanel from some days before when Lily had run amok. A gift from Gary.

  “I hate going in here,” she said.

  “Just plug your nose and go.” Stan waited outside the door and tried not to look at the unmade bed, the scattered clothes. Gary’s toothbrush for some reason lay on the bedside table.

  “Nothing is coming!” Lily announced.

  “Concentrate!”

  The thin layer of dust on the dresser, on the closet mirror, on the abstract male nude hanging tilted over the bed.

  “It’s not coming!”

  His mother’s footfalls shuddered the stairs. How could such a skinny woman make so much noise? When she thudded into the bedroom, her blouse was already half off.

  “Oh, you’re here,” she said. But the blouse came all the way off anyway. Black lace bra.

  Stan studied his toes. She slid open the closet door and flipped through her dresses as if they were files in a cabinet.

  “Lily is peeing,” he said.

  “It’s not coming!”

  Stan’s mother stepped out of her slacks, which stayed squatted on the floor in front of the closet.

  Stan escaped to his bedroom. Even with the door closed and the pillow over his head he still heard Lily say, “But you said you weren’t going out!” He plugged in his music. Gain/Loss sang, Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna do? straight into his ears in the darkness over and over until the house was still.

  Music off. Lily made little unasleep huffing-chuffing breathing noises in the next bedroom. He hadn’t heard the door close, but his mother was gone. All still and dark.

  With his eyes shut he imagined himself on the tryout court, all last year’s returning JV stars there, Coach Lapman watching, everyone watching. He caught the ball and leaned left, went right then bing! On the spot, straight up like a human spring . . . the wave moving through him, the spin of the ball, the arc in the air. Swish. Nothing but net. Nothing but window. Silhouette. Dark against light. The twisting shot . . . and the twist of Janine’s arms as she tugged up the T-shirt . . . he hadn’t looked and yet the black and white danced in his mind . . . her dark bra, the points of her hair, the fall of her breasts . . . despite it all the show went on as soon as he closed his eyes.

  On and on it went.

  2

  The alarm. Seven a.m. Stan was somewhere in the mountains fighting off a band of terrorists intent on stealing all the mountain goats. They were falling to his broom handle, to his furious feet.

  Then he was awake and stiff. Stiff as a guy wire.

  It made no sense at all. He stared up at the gloomy ceiling waiting to unstiffen.

  He lifted his knees so that the sheets would touch nothing. Emptied his mind. Filled it with dishes. Dust mops. Digging in the garden. Foot on shovel. Shovel in dirt. Worms wriggling in black earth. Limp, cold, squishy earthworms.

  Ridgepole.

  Stan got up. Ridgepole in his pajamas. Why?

  He pulled on a sweatshirt, snuck to the door and glanced out. Silence, all clear. He eased down the stairs, keeping his weight on the outside of each foot.

  “Stanley?” His mother was at the front door. Just coming in.

  Stan sat on the stairs, pulled his legs together and the sweatshirt down.

  “How’s Gary?” he asked.

  His mother fiddled with her shoes in the front hall. She never wore heels except when she saw Gary. And her dress barely made it halfway down her thighs.

  “I thought you have an eight o’clock?” Stan said.

  “I do. I do!” Now she wanted to get by him on the stairs. “Are you all right, honey?”

  Stiff as a poker. Erect as the Washington Monument.

  “I just have a little stitch in my side,” he said.

  “Oh, honey.”

  “I’m going to sit here like this until it goes away.”

  “Maybe you should walk around a bit.”

  “I’m just going to stay exactly like this.” Stan squished over to the side of the step so that his mother could get by.

  “Do you want some orange juice?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes drinking something —”

  “I’ll be fine. You need to get going.”

  She squeezed past finally. Stan went into the bathroom and stood over the toilet. From the upstairs he heard his mother say, “Oh, Lily!” again and again. He heard sheets being pulled off the bed, his mother’s heavy footfalls, Lily’s crying. His mother’s voice became operatic. “I just don’t understand. If you need to get up in the night, get up! I know you peed before — ”

  “I just didn’t feel it! I just didn’t . . .”

  Now his mother was calling down the stairs.

  “Stanley, could you please handle your sister’s sheets? I have an eight o’clock!”

  Life was better down in the basement. It was dark and cool and the ceiling was low enough that Stan could almost bump his head. Maybe by Christmas he would bump his head. And quiet. No amount of opera from upstairs could leak all the way down into the basement, especially when the washing machine was running.

  It only took a minute to dump in the sheets and soap and set everything going, but Stan stayed for the pure peace of it. He liked the smell of the detergent. House in order. He leaned against the machine.

  Janine Igwash walked out of the darkness again right past him. She lingered near him in silence by the laundry table where the old spent sheets of fabric softener congregated along with little bits of tissue left in pockets from laundries past.

  The temperature went up inexplicably. It was a cold-water wash but the heat was on. She was just by the laundry table, breathing. He leaned a little harder against the washing machine. She was bigger than him but not by much. She started to tug at her T-shirt. Arms crossed at the bottom the way women do. Breathing and . . .

  Stan stepped back. Leaning up against the washing machine! He opened the lid and watched the cold soapy gray water churn, churn, churn until it was safe to he
ad upstairs again.

  —

  Janine Igwash sat four rows away from him in biology. She was wearing a red shirt that his eyes had trouble keeping buttoned, especially once he noticed a small tattoo at the base of her neck near her shoulder. He wasn’t close enough to see what it was. She didn’t look at him at all.

  They were dissecting cows’ eyes but there weren’t enough eyes to go around, thank God, so they were in groups of four. Jason Biggs was handling the scalpel. Taking notes were the identical sisters Melinda and Isabelle Lafontaine who were each wearing jeans and pearls and running shoes. One of them was pierced in the left eyebrow, the other in the right. Stan could never keep them straight. They both had big watery eyes like this sorry specimen Jason Biggs was slicing apart.

  “Stop now, Jason!” Left Eyebrow said. “I think we’re supposed to sketch that.”

  Janine Igwash turned and pulled her red shirt off her shoulder. Stan’s mind could make her do that. But he still couldn’t quite see the tattoo.

  “Lapman canceled junior varsity for this year,” Jason Biggs said then.

  Janine unbuttoned a bit more and pulled her shirt farther off her milky white shoulder and stepped toward him, parting the desks . . .

  “What?”

  Her tattoo was something sinewy, coiled but not a snake, prettier and . . .

  Biggs snapped his fingers. “Canceled!”

  Gray desiccated flesh hung off the pitiful eyeball.

  “How can he do that?”

  “He just did. They couldn’t find another coach. Lapman is doing girls’ JV this year. You’ll have to try out for Burgess.”

  Burgess, the varsity coach, ate juniors for breakfast.

  “You can keep going, Jason,” Right Eyebrow said. “Let’s get the cross-section.”

  “Lapman’s coaching girls’ JV?” Stan said. He felt his gut contract into a hard rubber ball. No JV? After he had trained on his own, night after night, month after month . . .

  “Weren’t you the final guy cut last year?” Biggs said. “You should have made it, man.”

  This felt like one of those bits of news that was going to take a long time to comprehend. Like when his father left five years ago to live with the twenty-three-year-old he had impregnated. That could not be understood all at once. Stan didn’t feel like he understood most of it even now. It took time to soak down through the layers, like water working its way through clay.