Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  Leonard glanced his way and looked down again, nodding. “Hmm. Okay.”

  “You think?”

  “They’re inland, you know. Gotta go past Terrace. Where we’re talkin’ deep snow.”

  “Right.”

  “And we’re talkin’ poachin’. Just so you know.”

  “I thought you guys had rights all year round. You know, for cultural reasons. For Aboriginal sustenance.”

  “Sell it to whitey, it’s poaching.”

  “What if you give it to whitey?”

  “Touché.”

  “But you can get me some?”

  “I’d need at least a week for that too.”

  “Actually,” and here Andy hunched down with eyebrows raised to peer into his friend’s face, to let him know he was serious when he said, “I think I’d mostly want the nose.”

  LOOKING FOR DREW, Andy wandered out into a party that felt thin and faintly poisonous, in the way of parties that have passed their peak. Leonard’s niece and nephew ineptly packed food and equipment under the sober direction of Ken Worthington, who kept an eye on the kitchen lest Leonard leap from it. Andy could have told him that Leonard had left through the back way, but instead shot Worthington a smile and shrug of commiseration at having to work while everyone else was playing.

  Drew was over by the stereo, bumping one hip to a song Andy recognized, some of Drew’s old funky fusion. The volume was too loud in the half-empty room and added to the night’s desperate quality. Drew’s goofy dance — he lifted a leg high to lightly stab down a big toe as if popping an ant — made Art Tanner’s wife laugh and, off to the side, Pauline smiled despite herself. For a couple about to break up, she hovered close. She looked never not aware of him.

  Andy watched his friend, who evidently had his head-Betty locked away in some closet for the night. As always when Drew was drunk and moving, his hairline sprang with sweat and little talons of hair clung to his forehead, that Roman emperor look. He had a fancy-frilled meatball toothpick in his mouth and seemed to enjoy being watched. It felt like Drew had avoided him tonight, perhaps feeling Andy’s intentions from afar. When Drew didn’t feel like talking, no talking took place. It was sad to so clearly see the twelve-year-old in his friend bouncing there, older bones in older flesh, a guy not too happy about anything any more, it seemed. Andy wondered when it was they’d last truly talked. When had they ever talked? There was that notion of best friends not needing to, which is why they were best friends. But that no longer seemed true. It felt like something had shifted, or faded. It felt like Drew could move away, could just suddenly leave without even telling him.

  May and Li were still surrounded, but by a more motley clump of men, despite their suits. Andy found it telling that no formal introductions had taken place, no gesture of civic welcome. It seemed no one had found out who they were, exactly, other than who they weren’t.

  Art Tanner was drunker and still cozying up to Li, who stood trapped in the L of the cream couch and chair set. May was nodding at a couple of men, a baby oyster poised on a toothpick, listening so politely that she couldn’t pop it in. If May asked him, and he hoped she would, Andy could tell her that oysters, just like the one on her toothpick, couldn’t grow up here.

  This should probably be his last glass of wine but he was also going to tell her how in Prince Rupert, after a late-night tureen of pho or a pomegranate martini, you could go home and sit with your window open and hear wolves trilling. They never used to come this close, but since they built the dump a decade back they came for the rats, Andy had heard. Then got good at picking off pets. May, his neighbour two houses down was walking her old black lab up near the hospital last spring when, completely ignoring her, two wolves were on her dog, which they “disembowelled in about three seconds.” Only a month ago somebody’s poodle was gobbled in the industrial park and now there are signs posted there, May. How cool is that?

  Sweating, weaving the tiniest bit, Andy knew he wanted May to understand why he’d never left. He also wanted to tell May about Laura, and that actually he wasn’t alone, despite appearances. He’d ask May if they had modern dance in China, or if it was still all traditional posing, or Cirque du Soleil plate-spinning.

  May got her oyster in and chewed it, nodding to someone’s lecture about the Beijing Olympics. Leonard’s niece walked by with a bottle of red in one fist and a white in the other, filling glasses, and how could May not want to know about the Tsimshian people, who came from Asia but hadn’t strayed far from the land bridge just north of here. In 1906 when this was a tent city a bunch settled here for white man’s commerce and poisons, and the influx continued still, which was a problem, May, which you can see.

  “Hello! Andy!” May was waving him over. He hoped he hadn’t been staring.

  Leonard’s niece drifted back, saw his nod and filled his glass with white wine. Which, mixed with the dregs of shiraz, turned pink.

  But, the Dancing Monkey — was May allowed to know? He’d read that the rich could still arrange it in one secret Hong Kong restaurant. So inhuman was this meal it was hard to contemplate without feeling shame for your species. It used a special table with a hole in its centre, a harness beneath. From this hole the top of a live monkey’s head protruded, the top half of the skull surgically removed, the living brain exposed, into which eager diners would dig, lifting out tasty bits of grey matter. Below the table, the monkey “danced,” as now a left leg was triggered, now an elbow. But, horrible as this was, wasn’t it maybe the outer limits of an honest instinct — faint now — to eat the strongest, smartest thing? To take it in, absorb it? To chew the pounding heart of your enemy? To eat vitality itself? To eat worth? Wasn’t this the idea in health-food bars where they scissor a bunch of growing wheat grass then shriek it through a juicer so you can gulp down the deep-sparkling cells? Wasn’t sushi in this ballpark too? May, your enemies the Japanese have an even fresher sushi — fish that’s still alive, eaten to gain the creature’s living essence. What was the word? He would ask Leonard if he could deliver a salmon that was still alive.

  With Andy at May’s side the fellows who were being loud didn’t get any less loud, and Andy saw that the Wheat Women were being mocked. He could also see, over in the far corner, on another set of couch and chairs, Mr. Madden sitting in a square with the mayor and two other like types, perhaps agreeing that though tonight had performed below expectations, steps could still be made in the eventual emergence of the Port of Prince Rupert as a global superport. The future is now as we step into tomorrow.

  The main mocker was red-haired Dan Boyd, who told them, “So, tell the chairman to, you know, turn the country on to —”

  “We no longer have chairman. Is now a —”

  “— canola, right? Tell the chairman we’ll sell him a billion bottles of canola.”

  “Yes, canora,” Li said, turning from Dan Boyd’s wolfish mouth to Art Tanner’s wobbly stare. “Is Monsanto, yes?”

  Dan Boyd was a supervisor at the terminal and a man with whom Andy had frail relations. They’d been childhood friends but weren’t any more, so there was that slight embarrassment. There was the other embarrassment, that Andy could have been a supervisor if he’d only wanted to but had shunned it, and now they played the roles of boss and underling.

  Boyd pointed at Art Tanner’s dog behind the couch, shaking his finger at it. “Watch it, Art,” he yelled. The dog was medium-sized with a sheepdog’s face, groomed to show-quality, and Andy bet Art Tanner brought it everywhere less out of love than from wanting to show off how well behaved it was. “Watch it, Art,” Boyd yelled, making the dog raise its head. “They might eat it. They might think it’s some kind of giant chicken.”

  The main reason Andy thought ill of Dan Boyd was because of his children, and how he didn’t want them.

  IT WAS RAINING as he walked, which felt ordinary and good. Rain and this wind would make his open door, warm kitchen, and then bed a string of comforts he would try to stay awake to.

 
He’d left the party in a bluster. He’d grown irritable and, not smiling, he’d told Dan Boyd to “be nice,” and then told Mr. Madden that those two women should be looked after and sent home in a taxi, eliciting “ooooo!’s” from the men, including, Andy was bugged to see, Drew.

  He chose a long route in order to work bad food from his legs and wine from his head. From ghostly habit he headed to what was once Central Park, which disappeared five years ago when the several acres of woods in the heart of downtown were razed and a tin-sided mall erected in its place. Now, out of the rain, were a Zellers and banks and a Superstore and discount clothiers with racks of off-gassing shirts sewn up in the sweatshops of Asia. (They arrived by truck after being unloaded in the port of Vancouver.) Many mourned the loss of Central Park but at the same time admitted it had become a hazardous place. Lots of drunks passed out there and who knows what other garbage ugliness went on in the dark and wet. Drunks still tried to get comfortable inside on the mall’s benches, maybe attuned to the ghost forest they thought still surrounded them, but it was easy for security guards to patrol a mall.

  A few blocks along Andy strode past his mother’s. All looked dark and peaceful. For some reason Andy always felt good when he knew his mother was asleep.

  Then he found himself on 6th, and here was the Northwest Academy of Dance. Despite the rain, he stopped. The home-lettered sign, its font verging on Olde English, worked hard for elegance, a suggestion that everything inside was Old World and not from here. Which was true, perhaps, if you considered the origins not only of ballet but also jazz and tap and modern. Here, the only dance was Tsimshian — even Haida dance was considered a bit of an incursion. In any case, the Academy had been Laura’s ticket out.

  Andy had spent a lot of time in front of this building waiting for her to finish. (Occasionally her mother would waltz out first, having watched the session, her eyes’ icy warning serving only to give his Romeo to her daughter’s Juliet all the more tang.) Out she’d race, to stop short two feet away, embarrassed by “how I must smell,” and it took Andy months (afraid she’d think him an animal) to let it all out and tell her that not only didn’t he care that she smelled but that he loved it, one smell in particular. “I have multiple stink?” she laughed, and he told her about the three fairly distinct smells, the only one he didn’t care for being the one that smelled like Campbell’s chicken soup. (Sometimes he could smell her feet and that was no treat either.) He said he’d noted no pattern to her smells and had no idea if they were linked to diet, exertion, or, “you know, your hormonal stuff.” He explained what little he knew of pheromones and how they maybe dictated his preferences. He probably talked too much and revealed too much about himself, and it didn’t get her walking any closer but he was brave enough to insist that “one smell in particular” drove him crazy. Plus he loved those leg warmers bunched on her ankles like that, and how her black terrycloth headband framed her face.

  “Laura Schultz.” Andy heard himself actually whisper this, standing in the rain in front of the old Academy. Back when he was so in love with her, especially when she was newly gone and he missed her leg warmers and her smells, he fell in love with her name. He remembered driving to Terrace and back, just for the hell of driving, when he enjoyed a kind of fit of saying it — Laura Schultz—into the echo of his small car just to hear it again and again. He remembered a day on Leonard’s first boat, a rotting old crabber that lacked even a winch for lifting the traps, back when Leonard was wild and would raid competitors’ traps and replace the crabs with a bottle of something if he liked them, or nothing if he didn’t, and Andy spent that day in sleet pulling line and saying “Laura Schultz” over and over. Laura Schultz, Laura Schultz. He remembered reaching into a pot to wrestle out a stubborn crab that wouldn’t release its stiff legs from the mesh, as if knowing things would get worse for it outside this cage, and when he pried it free and rattled it and yelled “Laura Schultz!” at it, Leonard asked him why the fuck he just didn’t buy a plane ticket. Laura Schultz wasn’t a pretty name, and he heard nothing much good in the German part, but it was an earthy name, with a visceral tug to it, butter and warmth and promise, a warren of good-smelling animals. Sometimes just saying it to himself was enough to make him horny, horny past the point of not-doing-something-about-it horny. Laura Schultz. Laura Schultz.

  “Laura Schultz.” That was the year he’d walk by this Academy on purpose for the yearning leap it gave his stomach. By then he was in solid at the grain terminal and getting lots of overtime and he was saving up for Toronto. He was really going to move there and join her. It wasn’t just to join her, it was to go to U of T, it was to get out of PR. Some friends had already left. He would look up at the black lettering and feel that, indirectly, the Academy was his ticket out too. Who knows if he would have been making this move without it?

  Andy saw no light coming from any upper window but he guessed Helen and Michael Smythe still lived up there. They’d come from England and taught everything themselves, occasionally letting star pupils like Laura teach a beginners’ class. Michael was ludicrously effeminate and everyone agreed theirs was a lavender marriage, a cover for them both. Andy thought Helen odd, almost dim-witted for never changing her loud manner no matter who she spoke with — a six-year-old tap dancer, a parent, or husband Michael.

  Five or six silent shadows, teenagers probably, were moving in his direction from a block away, so Andy spun and walked. You never knew. These last few years, you just didn’t. Though this street had long felt dangerous to him for other reasons. After Laura’s final letters, to get home from downtown he walked along 3rd in order to avoid seeing the Academy. It and all things dance were dark, seductive, and took advantage of the innocent.

  They were both just nineteen when it took her away again but this time dragged her farther than he was allowed to follow. She’d been in Toronto one month short of a year when the first of her final letters came, and it began:

  Andy everything has changed. I don’t know how to start or make it easier for you so I’ll just say it. I’m having a baby about six months from now. The father is a dancer, Robert, who leads the company. We started seeing each other only a few months ago. I never lied to you, and I still won’t. I still love you. I don’t know if I love him. But I’m going to have the baby, so I want to love him. He says he loves me, he says he’ll get married if I want to, but I don’t know about that yet. I don’t know how much to say about Robert, because of how this must feel for you.

  Everything I do and think has to be for the baby right now. This feels selfish and maybe looks selfish because I don’t know this new person at all, and it’s still more me than anything else. But I can’t even say I’m sorry to you, because I can’t let myself go in that direction even for a second. I’ve decided to be happy (such a silly word, but it’s the one I’m shooting for) and I can see that happiness is a decision. Once I decided to have the baby, I also decided that everything is in service to it, even my moods. I can’t look back. I can’t be sorry. My career is also going to take a backseat. Maybe it’s finished forever, even before it began. Like us. But I’ve decided to decide that that’s only good.

  I can say that I’m sorry about what you must be feeling now. And for me to say that I still love you, might be a kind of torture, but I can’t not say it, because it’s what I feel, and I’ve also decided that it’s good, it’s only good, to love. Mostly, to love a baby. To love two men. To love anyone, everyone. To love the world if you can. That’s what I’ve decided. If I turn back, if I have doubts about any of this, if I look in any direction other than the one I’m looking in right this second, it’s only dark.

  Wet to the skin and tired, Andy passed Moose Tot Park, its carved wooden sign and name not charming tonight but absurd. He turned onto his street. He did feel healthier for the walk. It was darker on his street, with fewer streetlights, and patches of forest between houses each on their half-acre lot, and he could hear what were probably foot-high waves breaking on the beach
below. He knew in his childhood bones this darkness and this sound, knew it more than he knew the town, its density and fret, and he felt more comfortable here than anywhere. Why then did it feel like a wraith could fly up from behind and take him by the neck and fling him way out over the black waters of the bay, where he’d drop and drown alone, anonymous, no trace?

  Andy shivered, told himself that aloneness was no cause for fear of any kind. Striding his driveway, in a further act of bravery he forced himself to walk beside his house, trailing fingers on the wet siding, to the even more complete and windy darkness of his backyard. Careful to stay well clear of his new cliff, he stopped somewhere in the yard’s middle. The wind carried the raw-earth smell to him, his property’s wound. The wind felt fine on his face, actually. It woke him up further. He still felt angry in the gut.

  He’d hated seeing red-haired Dan Boyd in his happy mood of attack. He was what drove Andy from the party in the end. A decade ago, because of drinking and a jail term for a hit and run, Boyd’s wife lost custody of their young boy and girl. Out of prison, she kidnapped them and in a feat of disguises and stealth stayed free — and by all accounts a sober, doting mother — for seven years. They caught her in Nova Scotia; she went to prison again and the kids, now ten and twelve, were returned to Boyd, whose string of nannies were as mean to them as he was. People said the kids should have been left with their mother, and laws should be more common-sense human. For instance, they didn’t even ask the kids what they thought. A social worker had told Leonard they were clearly afraid of Boyd, and that Boyd took as many shifts at work as he could. And once when drunk Dan Boyd said this to Andy: “Parents don’t like their kids. They actually don’t and they’re too chickenshit to admit it.”

  Andy had left the party if only to be free of Dan Boyd. Then, after avoiding Andy all night it was Drew who caught him as he fled out the door. Drew ran up and grabbed his arm and spun him round to face him. His friend was dripping sweat and he looked pissed off at everything and nothing. Laughing, Drew told him in a kind of hiss, “It’s all sinking, man — don’t worry about it.” He was being only mean. As if Andy could think of nothing but his yard. Drew was beaten down and poisonous and wanted to spread it. He laughed again, shoving Andy to launch himself back into his father’s rotting party, and Andy had never seen his friend quite like this in all the time he’d known him.