Homesick (37 page)

Somehow Daniel pulled himself together and returned to the kitchen. What he now saw didn’t strike him as funny any longer, just a sorry sight, vaguely disgusting, the white body bloated and sagging underneath a ridiculous hat. Before he could censor himself, Daniel heard himself saying, “Jesus, Alec, if you want to wash all over, whyn’t you do it like normal people and take a bath?”

And Alec said stonily, “Because I’m so goddamn old and so goddamn stiff and so goddamn fat I can hardly jack myself up out of a tub anymore. That’s why.”

Although there were sometimes awkward moments such as that, by and large the two of them got along well enough in the touchy, complaining, grudging fashion usually associated with long-married couples. Lacking any other companions their peculiar partnership had become the centre of their lives. Alec had summarily ordered his old friends, Huff and colleagues, to keep clear of his property following the uproar at Christmas and they had sulkily done so, even when they learned Vera had moved out. Also, Alec’s relations with Mr. Stutz were not quite as they once had been. The old man held himself very cool and aloof in Stutz’s presence for fear that a heated word might betray how hurt he had been by his friend and employee going behind his back to lend money to his daughter. Now all Alec’s natural mischievousness, his desire to get sober Stutz’s goat, were suppressed in case his teasing might be interpreted as bitterness or injured pride. He bit his tongue and didn’t say, “What’s this Stutz? You set on a promotion? Interested in moving from general manager to son-in-law? Interested in buying into the business?” No, following the opening of The
Bluebird the two men treated each other with business-like rectitude. Nor did Mr. Stutz receive any more late-night phone calls from his employer.

Daniel was similarly isolated. Kids might say hello to him on the street but they never bothered to stop and talk. Dancing lessons had not saved him from loneliness; no girl had looked at him and imagined Montgomery Clift. On the other hand, he knew that whatever qualities he owned were not ones to endear him to the boys. He was hopeless at sports, no joker, and too proud to play Tonto to anybody’s Lone Ranger.

So that summer Daniel and Alec had their routines and each other. An hour each afternoon was spent pottering in the crazy garden which had sprouted chaotically, rows sown half with one vegetable, half with another, rows sown twice with different vegetables, a thicket of dill bristling in the potato patch because the old man had accidentally spilled a packet of seed there in the spring. Alec wouldn’t let Daniel pull it up. He said it never hurt to be reminded of your mistakes. Daniel didn’t argue. The garden was his grandfather’s business. He directed the boy in weeding, thinning, and hilling, while reserving watering rights for himself. He was never happier than when he plodded about the garden in black, high-topped rubber boots, a hose snaking after him as he sprayed the sweet peas entwined in the chicken-wire fence, doused the bald green heads of the cabbages, shook a shower over the potatoes, or sprinkled the marigolds.

Growth that summer was abundant, lush. There was really no reason to water at all except that it gave the old man pleasure. Rain was plentiful, unlike the previous year when it had been necessary to haul tanks of water from the farm. Spectacular storms often broke late on hot afternoons, black and purple thunderheads swelling on the horizon like bruises, lightning breaking open the sky in jagged, bluish-yellow cracks that spilled down a blur of wild rain and wind. Then stillness, the garden awash in water, the rain barrels foaming and swirling under the drain spouts.

The storms frequently interfered with television signals and the reception of the movie matinee. While the lightning clashed apocalyptically overhead there were arguments about unplugging the set.

“Yeah, if we unplug the set now I’ll never find out what happens. Just wait a minute. The movie’s almost over.”

“It’s over now. That goddamn aerial on the roof is no better than a lightning rod, it’ll suck the juice right out of the sky and down into the set. That’s an
RCA
there and I don’t want the sonofabitch fried. Unplug it.”

“What if the aerial gets hit while I’m unplugging the set? Who gets fried then?”

“If you’re worried, wear my rubber boots. Come on, quit stalling. Just unplug the sonofabitch.”

Staring intently at the screen, doggedly delaying. “You unplug it.”

“You want me to shut that set down for the Olympics? That what you want?”

“No.”

“Then unplug it. Now.”

Daniel slouched sullenly to the
TV
. “Jesus.”

It was a potent threat. For weeks Daniel had been anticipating the Games. Growing more and more excited as publicity and news coverage built, he was given to lecturing his grandfather, passing on with an air of sublime self-importance whatever information he had managed to glean from studies of
Sport
and
Sports Illustrated
in the magazine rack of the drugstore. It was a premeditated attempt to arouse interest in his grandfather so he wouldn’t balk at watching a bunch of foreigners competing in sports he didn’t understand and probably hadn’t even heard of. Perhaps it worked because when the Olympics finally began the old man proved to be a quick sell. He was easily as enthusiastic as his grandson, maybe more so.

For the duration of the Games their routine altered and their days rearranged themselves around the broadcast of Olympic
reports. Alec greedily immersed himself in the spectacle, even insisting on watching events that Daniel had trouble considering sports at all: dressage, field hockey, European handball, race-walking, to name a few. The sorts of activities which communists excelled at, but which no self-respecting North American athlete would be caught dead doing. Daniel thought that any sport which required a man to wear tights wasn’t a sport at all and as for race-walking, that was a comedy routine.

To make matters worse, his grandfather liked to enliven their viewing by cheering for the Iron Curtain countries. Daniel knew what he was up to, but being a Russian-hater he couldn’t help getting hot under the collar when the East bloc won and was applauded by the old man. Just once he wanted to get under his skin the way his grandfather got under his. He tried. Rome was not the only scene of fierce Olympic competition. Daniel had something disparaging to say about every Soviet success.

“There goes another Ivan to get his medal for being best at some pukey sport played by about four people in the whole world. And of the other three who play the dumb sport, likely two of them are Russian anyway.”

“Magnificent athletes, the Russians,” said his grandfather.

“Whoever heard of this stuff? European
handball
, for chrissakes. That’s a game? And why do we have to play their sports and they don’t have to play ours? How come no baseball or football? I’d like to see how they’d do having to play a real game like baseball or football. Then we’d see.”

“Oh,” said his grandfather with maddening calmness, “give them a year or two of practice and they’d master that the way they’ve mastered everything else. Magnificent athletes, the Russians.”

They only struck a truce when it came to cheering for the Italians and Canadians; then they found themselves temporarily in the same camp. Both were downcast when Harry Jerome of Canada cramped in the semi-finals of the one hundred metres and had to hobble pitifully off the track. After that happened, despite
his protestations of admiration for the Russians, the old man only really cared about the Italians. He liked the way Italians wore their hearts on their sleeves, without excuses, like kids, weeping at a loss, exulting in a victory. He even forgot his fellow-traveller pose in the welter-weight boxing final, cheering Giovanni Benvenuti’s win over the Russian Radonyak. When Berruti won the two hundred metres, stylishly insolent in sunglasses, Alec was delighted by the sight of the ecstatic Roman crowd lighting newspapers in the stands and waving them aloft to salute their hero. “Look at those crazy Italian buggers,” he said, shaking his head at the carnival, “having themselves a time like a bunch of kids.”

Today they are watching Olympic officials in white suits and white fedoras sort and organize runners for the marathon. Alec has never heard of a marathon and Daniel is passing on to him whatever he has learned from his reading of
Sports Illustrated
. He speaks reverently of Emil Zátopek, most famous previous winner of the 26 mile, 385 yard race. At first his grandfather refuses to believe it possible, that human beings could, or would, run such a distance, but Daniel keeps assuring him that it is true, that the spare, sinewy men with hollowed cheeks who are nervously shuffling their feet and prancing on the spot are prepared to race each other over all those punishing miles.

“This I’ve got to see,” says Alec in disbelief. “Why, that’s further than Hyacinth,” he remarks, naming a town down the line. “And why 26 miles and 385 yards? Why those extra yards? Is it because somebody once survived the 26 miles and they needed those 385 yards to finish him off? If you wanted to race horses that far the
SPCA
would have you up on cruelty to animal charges.”

The announcer seems to view the race in a similar light. His preamble is full of words like pain, courage, suffering, endurance. He speaks of a marathoner arriving at that stage in a race when the body’s resources are utterly depleted and the runner’s muscles, sapped, function on will alone. As he talks, the cameras sweep over the drawn, anxious faces of the race favourites, pausing briefly for
a moment to dwell on an oddity, a slight, grave black man who, it is announced, has inexplicably chosen to run the marathon in bare feet. The announcer states his opinion that no matter how unaccustomed to footwear this primitive African might be – an Ethiopian in Emperor Haile Selassie’s bodyguard named Abebe Bikila – he is making a serious miscalculation choosing to run barefoot. The cobble-stoned streets of Rome that make up part of the route will be considerably less forgiving to his feet than the highland meadows around Addis Ababa where he is accustomed to train.

Yet at the six and a half mile mark of the race the Ethiopian can be found in the leading group of runners. Monkman can’t believe their pace and predicts they’ll never maintain it. “They’ll never hold it,” he says, “never.” Six miles further on Rhadi the Moroccan and the barefoot Ethiopian surge away from the pack, Rhadi in front and Bikila poised at his shoulder, running relentlessly and mechanically like a wind-up toy, bringing Daniel and his grandfather to the edge of their seats, leaning forward toward the screen. The elapsed time is announced as sixty-two minutes, thirty-nine seconds and his grandfather excitedly urges Daniel to find a pencil and paper and compute exactly how fast the two leaders are running. Daniel has never seen him this excited, crouched in his chair, hands rubbing his kneecaps, eyes welded to the television and its fleeting figures, the old man is utterly enthralled by the drama. Before Daniel completes his calculation the television reports that Rhadi and Bikila are covering one mile approximately every five minutes.

“That can’t be right. Is that right?” his grandfather demands without shifting his eyes from the
TV
.

Daniel gives a flick of the pencil on the sheet of paper and confirms it. “Yes,” he says, “that’s about right.”

“How do they keep going?” asks the old man softly.

At the twenty-two-mile mark Bikila spurts past the Moroccan bringing Alec out of his chair and onto his feet. Alec jabs a forefinger
at the figure on the television, pumps his shoulder,
“Run you black bastard!”
he exults.
“Run!”
Stabbing his finger at the runner on the screen as if it were a prod. Daniel glances up at his grandfather and feels a slight alarm. Alec, swaying, has to reach out and steady himself with the chair back. The old man’s eyes are burning.

Now the Ethiopian is in first place and Rhadi pursuing. The camera fixes on the rigid, determined mask of Bikila’s face, sweeps down for a shot of naked feet skimming above and whispering on the pavement. Twilight lowers on the city and the little man forges on through the waning light, seemingly blind to the cheering crowds thickening along the race route. He looks to neither side, refuses blueberry juice and glucose offered from a refreshment station, simply runs on. The old man knows this is proper, this is how it must be. Bare feet and unslaked thirst.

Alec wishes he could watch the black man run forever. But Abebe crosses the finish line and the spell is broken. Then it is over for both of them. Bikila waves away the blanket race officials press on him. This too seems correct to Alec. As the tension drains from his body Bikila begins to laugh, then suddenly his laughter becomes tears and he weeps like a broken man. Monkman feels his own eyes filling. The winning time, two hours, fifteen minutes, sixteen and two-tenths seconds, is announced. The old man asks Daniel to write it down for him, carefully folds the paper the boy gives him, and slips it into his wallet, declaring to Daniel that he ought to remember this moment, they’ve just seen the toughest man in all the Olympics.

Daniel, desiring to get his own back for the Russians, says that is ridiculous. Come on, tougher than the boxers?

But the old man doesn’t trouble to answer his challenge. He seems to have slipped off in one of his trances again, wallet lying open in his lap.