Not long after Andrew took up mountain biking, Stan was keen to leave work for his physiotherapy appointment so he could vicariously relay Andrew’s stories of the torso-thigh wrestling match of riding to Susan, his physiotherapist.
“He should try yoga,” Susan once replied, hoisting Stan’s arms into the air. “It shows you who’s lazy. ‘Raise a leg,’ you say, and most people never give it a chance. You can coax, demonstrate, give them visualizations and still most people treat raising a leg like an intermediate step, not an end in itself.” She tried to let Stan’s arm drop to show him how little he was raising it himself, how body must first be mind, but he was already palpably proud of his reply.
“You should try teaching,” Stan said.
After twenty-four years of teaching at most levels — elementary during his own education, secondary by choice, peers at workshops, adults in or outside of prison — Stan knew a good class had ten to twenty per cent of its population willing to really do the work, to leap and then keep going, to change. Most want to coast, with or without your permission, with excuses or hostility. I’m here, but don’t expect me to change.
Throw acne and hand-held electronics at the Allenville inmates, release barely dressed girls among them, and they’d be ordinary students: lazy, some version of cowardly and resentful of their own who wanted out.
Trained for work inside a prison by various men in acrylic sweaters, Stan was repeatedly warned that he would certainly be — each of them would certainly be — approached to mule. Help a guy out. Or I’m protecting someone. Or Everyone needs favours. Or This letter’s for my girlfriend, but they’ll send it to my wife just to fuck me.
“That’s how it’ll start,” Stan was warned repeatedly. “They pretend they need you, that you’re doing them a favour. Carry anything, I mean anything, in or out, and you’re breaking our rules for them. Friday’s favour becomes Monday’s job threat. They pretend you’re helping them and then they start to squeeze. The only game you can play is a zero-weakness game. Never, ever give them an inch.”
The mule requests came as described. Stan’s dragging left foot kicked up pleas like dust. Letters, small packages, sealed cassette cases. But the threat didn’t come disguised as a favour.
36
Their sex was only partially verbal. My dirty this and give me your that. Whereas their arguments were almost exclusively verbal. Now, in memory, language pushes at him. Old taunts. Guilty admissions. Language pushes at him, pushes him on, pushes him down, while sex pulls at his balance. Here on every day of the ride at least one of their winter arguments between travel and study finds him, strafing him in the middle of a valley, adding weight to his climb or scorching his tent at night.
The Argument of Desire
“Of course I want to travel. With you. But I want to be ready to make the most of it,” he said.
“If you wanted to travel with me, you would.”
Their debate — travel versus grad school, change with a knapsack or change with a book — has mapped itself onto his daily debate of whether to remain on the bike-hostile Trans-Canada Highway (the hit-and-run way) or to strike out for the half-finished Trans Canada Trail, that carless utopia, that flatter club that would gladly have him as a member. Back in Nova Scotia, the Trans Canada Trail was off-puttingly intermittent, bursts of trail here and there that would require inefficient side trips and connecting jaunts. But here in New Brunswick, the trail lengthens, calling to him with its sweet, carless music. Here, and into Quebec, most of this patchwork trail has been converted from old rail lines. These old railways should be a dream, yesterday’s explosions and rock-breaking leaving him a blessedly flat four per cent grade. On the highway, he’s currently taking hills at seven, nine, or even an eleven per cent grade. When he’d first begun cycling and heard others speak of percentage grades for hills, he ignorantly assumed that a hundred per cent grade would be a vertical wall of asphalt. Oh no. Mark had eventually explained to him that a forty-five-degree hill, already impassable by car or bike, was a hundred per cent grade. Road grade is calculated by dividing the rise (height increase) by the run (horizontal distance). If he migrated to the Trans Canada Trail, his rises would be flattened into his run.
He’s tempted by the trail’s reliable grade, not just its ease, and also by its steadiness. His lungs could find their own rhythm. He’d feel his pounding heart as all friend and no enemy. On a trail, he could let his mind go even more, fling it to the day’s kilometres. He could be like the somnambulant minivan driver or the robotic commuter. All of that release would spare him the raven corpses of blown truck tires and the foul wind of engines, and he’d be faster, do better as tortoise than hare. But for now he’s come to want the hills. This way he takes the land into his body. And for every up, there is a down. Where would we be, as individuals or as a species, without our masochism?
To get back home, to get back to his home, he needs an up for every down.
The Argument of Honesty
“If this is so important, why not do it in a way that counts?” he asked Betty, somewhat genuinely and somewhat snidely.
“Why travel for a hobby when soon we might be able to travel professionally? I want to do more than just run away.”
37
After the divorce, Stan rarely saw full-length mirrors. The cheval mirror that had been his wedding gift to Pat left with her at his quiet insistence and went unreplaced by both negligence and design. After forty, he only caught his full-length reflection in a random encounter at a friend’s house or semi-annually in the crash-victim’s dance hall mirror of an occupational therapy clinic. The feeling of deflating horror got worse each time. When Stan watched an eighteen-year-old Andrew begrudgingly, then intriguingly, slide into the suit jackets that he had bought for himself in his mid-twenties, he was secretly proud to see a little slack hang on his son’s shoulders, to see that Andrew still had some space to fill. Teaching Andrew to wear a suit properly, Stan had asked him to point out the widest part of a man’s body.
“The shoulders,” Andrew said immediately, not pointing anywhere.
“Where? And I said point to the widest part, not grunt about it.” Andrew glared and slapped the tops of his shoulders with one hand, one shoulder then the other, a huffy self-knighting. For a moment there was no disease, just a teenaged son and a father in his late forties sharing their universal looks. I already know everything, so don’t dare try to teach me, said Andrew’s set jaw, compressed lips and upthrust chin. You know you’re an asshole, Stan’s eyes calmly replied.
“You’re relying on what you think you know, instead of actually looking. The widest part of a man’s body, a normal man’s body, is just below the ball of the shoulder, muscle not bone.”
They had traded those half-looks in the half-length mirror above Stan’s bedroom dresser, and then a month later Stan had found himself once again in a hospital’s occupational therapy clinic, staring into a wall of mirrors. Just shy of fifty, Stan already had the frustrated sexuality of a prostate cancer sufferer ten or fifteen years his senior. Stan stared into the wall of mirrors, alternating between horror at his body and the burning knowledge that at several dance schools around town, flexible young women in tight clothing were staring into mirrors exactly like the one in front of him. Unlike these fantasy ballerinas, Stan’s legs did quit, and far too often.
Worse than the bowed shoulders (his once-broad shoulders curled into an elderly woman’s osteoporotic clutch) and the crimped limbs was his defecting torso. The deep ruin of Stan’s body was nowhere more evident than in his unevenly hanging ribs, their slosh from the left side of his body to the right. The ribs are the saloon doors of the body. Something had flown out of Stan’s saloon in a rage and twisted the doors on its way out.
With teaching for Correctional Services, the mutinous ribs and half-functional arms were generally more asset than hindrance. Grease for every joke, extra gravitas for every lesson, the swing up from a visibly hard deal. Stan had worked for Corrections for ei
ght years before being transferred to minimum security, settling first along the gradations of medium security, which washed up everything. Men in their forties, neither old nor young, trying to resign themselves to a long, boring path from prison to clerking in some bad TV store, walking to a small apartment and heating tinned soup while young bloods hoped that enrolling in classes, just enrolling, never actually doing any work, might reduce the demerits they racked up breaking jaws and fermenting ketchup. In there, inside, Stan cut a rug.
To film Stan doing his English Language Sentence Dance it would be best to use different angles of him in front of the same chalkboard, one dialogue track stretching over multiple shots with the muscle-bound pupils changing year in, year out.
“Everybody up on your feet,” Stan said to one hulking class after another. “If I can do this, so can you: you’re the body crew. All right, put all your weight onto one foot. This is a verb. Say hello to the verb.” For years, Stan hadn’t been able to raise the opposite foot off the ground and made do with a flexed knee and shifting shoulders. “Verb. Verb. Funny word, isn’t it?”
Funnier still — side-splitting, whisky-pouring, vote-denying funny — was the fact that most of these less than monolingual bruisers who only used language to make excuses or leverage couldn’t recognize a verb for a day pass and a hooker, and yet they themselves were all verb. Whole lives of verbs. Verbs done to them, then by them. Verbs unavoidable, habitual, or delightful. Verbs by the mustachioed guy in the dirty red toque. Verbs by the guy who insisted on wearing a sleeveless shirt in November to flaunt the tattooed pillars of his arms.
“Verbs are action words. Your words,” he continued. “What’s the action? What’s the operation? All right, other foot. This is the subject. It causes or receives the action. It can be victim or perp. The doer, not the done.” Inside, they were all in a way station between doing and done. “Now, rock from one foot to the other.” Stan simply shifted shoulders and hips while in front of him several thousand pounds of muscle shifted from one leg to another. “Without a verb,” one foot, “and a subject,” the other, “you can’t stand up. Got it? Verb. Subject. Verb. Subject. Action. Actor. Action. Actor.” There it was, the loudest pedagogical applause he could hope for in here: silence. Ten, twenty seconds without a joke, a snub, or a taunt, just piles of muscle dropping on one foot then another. “All right, take a seat. Now, let’s get a basketball player up here and I’ll show you the semicolon.”
In hindsight, he would see Nick Vickerson’s sleeveless shirt in November as the mark of premeditation and the tip of a threatening iceberg. As class ended and the other students filed out, Nick and his bulging arms stayed back. He stopped at Stan’s Spartan desk and removed an envelope from inside his abbreviated shirt. Staring down at the seated Stan, he tossed the letter into his open briefcase.
“You’ll deliver that for me.” Nick jutted his chin at Stan. “Wouldn’t want any incomplete sentences around here.” For punctuation, Nick flared the uppermost layer of muscle clamped on top of his swollen shoulders and arms.
“Have a seat.” Stan nodded at the single chair bolted to the floor beside his desk. “Sit. For the details.”
Nick swung a leg over the chair and sat on it as if crushing a cat. Stan, meanwhile, was not idle. He had turned his own bent torso over to the desk’s metal drawers. With his right hand he opened the drawer wide enough to dangle in his left pinkie. With his finger wedged in the metal drawer, he finally looked back into Nick’s face, eye to angry eye.
“The next time you threaten someone,” Stan used the force of his right arm and chest to shut and press the drawer against his skinny finger, “pick someone who feels pain.” Nick didn’t move. “If you’re going to start punching, be sure to land one on my head. We’re insured at about thirty grand a pop, plus the LTD, and, frankly, I could use a nurse around the house.”
Nick seethed and twitched before spitting out, “Fucking cripple shit,” and hoisting himself out of chair and classroom.
Withdrawing his pinkie, Stan pressed it into the desktop to see if it was broken. His left knee withdrew from the panic button mounted on the inside of the desk’s leg bay.
By the next day, Nick was out of the class. By the end of the week, so was Stan, suddenly “rotated” to the minimum security Allenville Transitional. It took him nine months and three applications under the Access to Information Act to find his friend Paul Tucker’s signature on the bottom of his involuntary transfer order.
38
The next motorcycle isn’t so friendly. The roar growing behind Andrew has enough insectile whine and a nearly instantaneous acceleration that he needn’t check his mirror to confirm the approach of a motorcycle. Here comes the Cyclops’ wink. Christ, he’s flying.
The motorcycle approaches with such ballistic speed that as soon as Andrew recognizes the second helmet of a passenger in his mirror, the bike is suddenly behind him. At such a speed the motorbike should fly past him and leave the valley in seconds, and yet Andrew clearly hears the decelerating groans of low gears engaged at high revolution, of brakes and engine both working to slow down. Having swooped in on a scream, the motorbike drops its speed by eighty per cent to suddenly hang two bike lengths off Andrew’s rear. The motorbike begins trailing him, hanging back just five metres.
Here at day’s end, Andrew’s long shadow almost touches the two-stroke stalker. The roar behind is inhumanly steady, an inescapable shawl snug on Andrew’s shoulders. His tiny mirror duly records the rider’s unchanging visor. Even their helmets are bigger.
Two kilometres, three, four. So, what, you’ve got a skinny fetish? Yes, you and your polluted heart are faster. Go ahead, give me your startling shout, insult my ass and get on with it. Obviously I can’t sell you on self-propulsion, on the aerobic trance.
Six eternal kilometres with this burning shadow. Most alarming is the obvious boredom of this speed. From fifth to second gear just to trail the skinny primitive. Cocaine to herbal tea. Finally, Andrew turns and stares, leaving just four outstretched fingers on one handlebar, still pedalling, to look: What? Nothing. Engine, visor, leather. He yells it now, “What?! . . . Quoi?!” Still they hang back.
He’s thirsty from the increased pace. He wants to swat the dusty nub of his water hose into his mouth but is afraid to show any weakness. No, it’s foolish to go without water, to weaken himself for their sake. He drinks. He even spits a little, onto their side of his bike, not into the ditch.
What can he throw or swing? Tucked into his fist, the compact cylindrical pump may strengthen his punch a little, but then again it’s designed to be featherlight and could crumple or splinter at the first crack. The engine snorts, and the motored fatty lurches up another two feet to hang just inches past Andrew’s rear tire. Recalled here is the boyhood nudge of front tire to rear, the cyclist’s trip. Breathing, cranking and sweating, Andrew finally gets one image. His helmet. He’ll throw his helmet, pull his goalie. One quick hand under his chin, then a flick back to send the hard dome under their front tire. Feed them to the road.
When the motorbike pulls up alongside him, passing his rear tire but then holding again before running completely flush with his front, he thinks of the metre advance as a wolf’s snarling leap. Brushing off the flash of panic that would have had him roll into the ditch, damn the consequences, he sees, not beside him but in the mirror, the passenger’s right arm extending a tiny bundle of tinfoil. (Woman or slim man?) The driver levels off this offering with Andrew’s own arm. This is how they could finish him: wait for his hand foolishly outstretched, grab it, then kick the bike (or his ribs) out from under him. Still, a biker’s tinfoil ball. The speed. The offer between moving parallel lines. His exposed fingertips brush the passenger’s hand as she presses the tinfoil into his gloved palm.
Focused on the bridge of their arms, on proximate threat, he has been slow to notice the passenger’s other arm stretched around the driver’s far hip, its quickening stroke on the winded red pole of his exposed erection. A smal
l white moth splatters onto his leather chaps before they roar off.
When the valley is his again, when his pace is down and his mouth rinsed, his hands crowd together on his profile bar to open the foil while he pedals on. If this is the weed he’s hoping for, the proper leaf of this country’s flag, this unpeeling of the foil could spill crumbs or drop a valuable nugget. Or maybe they’ve wrapped up a dead bird for you. Your bird, crushed beneath your tire. The one mercy kill you did make. On a journey, memory tries to become action.
Ten more metres of poor steering and a sideswiped pace as he unfurls aluminum leaf after leaf. To nothing. This is just metal foil, an effective lure of shine alone.
39
By the time Andrew was seventeen, the medical trips to Toronto were done by car, not bus. Strap Stan in, negotiate CBC Radio versus CDs, advance and retreat with the volume dial, slip into the fast weave of traffic.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, give him some horn,” Stan barked.
They were in the left lane, the passing lane, of North America’s busiest highway, yet held back by a car in front of them content to travel at exactly the same speed as the one beside it.
The Push & the Pull Page 10
