Minister Without Portfolio (7 page)

20

The trees were covered in glitter ice and orange taxis slid around on baloney tires. A school bus full of kids braked on Kenna's Hill and slipped sideways through the intersection using all three lanes of road. The driver looked very calm about it. Henry walked a mile in cold weather to the YMCA and worked on the conditioning weights. Sometimes he did that, walk instead of taking the car. He looked at the car and remembered the jeep and could not bring himself to open the door. That was how Tender Morris ended his life and the idea of voluntarily harnessing himself into that position repulsed him. He'd seen a counsellor on his return and did not tell him about this aversion. The army physiotherapist had given Henry a routine to eventually loosen out the kinks from the impact he received from the exploding jeep. Martha had looked over the routine—it was printed on a two-sided laminated sheet that reminded him of scuba diving positions and eastern yoga. She said do this one and this one and not to do the exercises on the other side of the sheet. They've all been overturned.

He watched the news on a flat TV bolted above the running track. The news had no sound, just the anchor interviewing the minister of defence in high definition, their conversation in closed captions. You could understand in ten seconds the power and the status quo of the media and government by studying the national news with the sound off. He thought about Tender Morris and John Hynes. They had all met this minister of defence at the base in Kabul. Tender Morris was in extremely good physical shape at that dinner and then, within three months, they were attending Tender Morris's funeral.

He did thirty minutes on the rowing machine and then the exercises Martha recommended. He thought about what she had told him about Tender Morris's house. A house like that and he could row every day. Martha wasn't drinking. They were all drunk but she wasn't. Her righteous life. It was a bit of a drag this no drinking. Could he live with that. There is no telling if it is a truth or a fleeting truth but Henry saw that pervading inertia can take hold. Passive people think the world doesn't change, but it does and there are forces out there rolling stones and rubbing off moss. Inertia, if you recall, applies to acceleration and deceleration, not to change. Perhaps it was that impulse in him that first started to turn Nora away. Yes, he can see it now. She had loved how different from her he was. He was physical in the world, active, building things, and he used his shoulders and legs. She read books and sat at tables talking with colleagues. She attended meetings. And she realized that, along with the animal pulse in him, he possessed an independent drive to go public with his devotion. A willingness to be slayed, which is what war is. The biggest meeting of all.

He exercised until the taekwondo class ended then he boosted himself off the equipment and took a shower and dressed and reminded himself of the perversion of his thoughts: try and steer a safe course.

He walked home in a rifling wind and, instead of heading into Silvia's house, he shovelled out the car and jumped in and warmed up the engine and drove past Martha's place. Her car was gone. He knew where the key was. He could let himself in and put the lights on so she'd know someone was there. He could read one of Tender's books and get educated. Well, his car would be a clue right there. There is no need to frighten her.

He drove back through town past the new wings of development on the old city—subdivisions he had helped build with John and Tender back in their twenties. As he slowed he saw Silvia sitting in her car in the driveway. She looked like she was crying. Or at least, she had her hands on the wheel in a way that made it look like she was trying to hold on. The wheel was giving her anchorage. Keep driving. He drove to a coffee shop and had a coffee and an old-fashioned donut and read a section of a newspaper from the day before. It was sort of cheerful to know all the news before reading it. An insert with real estate. Illustrations of a house with a saw through it: under construction. John had told him, before heading out west, that the kids were growing and they needed to expand into the finished basement. Would Henry consider, you know, finding his own place.

I should call first, was his thought. Silvia answered. She was inside the house now. He explained he was moving on. Come over, she said cheerfully.

The dog helped him open the door then sidled over to him and presented his back. Wolfy. The kids weren't home yet from
school, and John was delayed in Fort Mac. Rick had asked him to stay on another week. They were short men with Henry gone and Jamie Kirby in arm casts.

Sometimes I'm so involved with my own life, he said, I forget what other people are doing.

The women around me, Silvia said, they all comment on the day as it's happening. They say they're having a wonderful time and isn't this great. I just want to live it. I want to think about it years from now, and judge it then. But I'm with a man who does this very thing, and it's made me realize I'm the man and he's the woman.

I'll not mention that to John.

I miss him, she said. He's loyal, and he loves. He's a generous man and he reminds me to be generous. She laughed. It's like feeding a lion. If I buy a roast, a big eighty-dollar prime rib for us and the kids, he won't go to bed until that roast is gone. He'll sit there at one in the morning with a jar of mayonnaise.

I've seen him in the meat section, Henry said. His nostrils flare at the steaks.

I've never seen anyone quiver with such excitement at meat.

Henry stroked the dog. He remembered how they got Wolf. John and Silvia and the kids had been swimming around the bay at their summer house when they saw the dog low in the water. The dog had come around a headland and was struggling. The dog's nose went under, just his ears left, and it was Silvia who waded out to the dog and grabbed him and yelled out to John for help. He was too heavy. There was a cinder block tied to his paw. They got the dog ashore and cut off the rope. They found the owner—an old guy out in Fermeuse. John went up to him, said if you ever do something like that again I'll come over and ram your
teeth down your throat. I ain't got no teeth to ram down. Then I'll get a set made for you and ram them down.

Silvia: Martha told me Tender's house is for sale.

It came out of Silvia's mouth before she knew what she was saying. Henry must have looked puzzled.

We all know about your night with Martha.

You don't seem entirely happy about it.

I've known you too long, Henry.

He was mainly a friend of John's and the way Henry was in the world was something she disputed. Silvia was fond of Tender Morris. John had said to Henry once, Have you ever noticed how Tender and Silvia talk?

You have to forgive the strong love and never speak ill of it, John had said. But John hadn't told his wife about that conversation in Kabul, where Tender described his ideal beauty. Surely he hadn't.

Henry explained his idea about Tender's house in Renews.

Silvia took the keychain off a pegboard in the kitchen and tossed it to him, the key to their summer house.

Martha's pregnant. Did you know that.

He caught the key and stared at it, afraid to look at Silvia again. If a promise can be a cube of sugar then he felt this cube dissolve in him. He could not look at Silvia but he knew she understood how he must feel. He was betraying that feeling in his face.

That makes sense now, he said.

I doubt the house is locked, just go in.

No it is locked, he said. We tried before to get in.

I meant our house. You should think about what you're doing here. You and Martha. I told you because I thought you should know.

The key dangled from a plastic Labrador dog. He was astonished at the situation. Martha was pregnant. Tender was on a month's leave and she got pregnant. Tender had turned the key on a new life and then Henry had shut the door and locked it.

He cleared his head. Are you okay taking care of things on your own, he asked.

Are you kidding me? Silvia laughed. I was upset when you drove by—you don't think I didn't notice you? I have a big life, Henry. A life without John. I get lots of things done and have friends and family to help with the kids.

You're becoming different.

You get different, don't you find.

I'll get us some dinner, he said. It's too late to be driving out there now.

The kids came home and he ordered pizza. They had those toys, the tin whales that you wound up. As it rolls along, it gobbles up a smaller fish. One was smashed but the other still worked. He put the kids to bed. He told them a story of a bear that had come into his cabin when he was a boy and the only evidence of the bear he found was a pawprint in the bacon fat in the frying pan.

I like cabins, Sadie said.

We could roast marshmallows over the sun, Clem said.

You could have really long sticks, Sadie said.

No, you climb on a cloud.

But when it's cloudy there is no sun!

When they were asleep Silvia had already gone to bed, so he found his way downstairs to the finished basement. Wolf was waiting for him. He woke up in the middle of the dark night,
bewildered. Then he got his bearings. But these were only bearings for where he was, not when he was.

He turned on a light and read a magazine. There was not a sound in the house.

He must have fallen asleep again for Silvia's face was waking him up. At first it felt like Silvia was someone he lived with, that he had ended up with Silvia and the rest of his adult life had been a dream of the night before. He could have, he guessed, ended up with Silvia. Stranger couplings have occurred. There was light around the bedroom curtains. Six in the morning. I'm making breakfast, she said. He put on his shoes. She saw him to the porch and must have read his mind. You don't have kids, she said. It's hard, having them, but they've made me understand who I am. And soon they'll be old enough and another life will return.

That's not what I was thinking.

Silvia had to tidy up the kitchen and get the kids off to school. She was late for work. She has a modern job where she works indoors on things that have happened outdoors. There is a wafer of electronic data that courses through her day and she gets to talk to other people and that part of her job she likes a lot.

Another life. The sun pulling itself out of the Atlantic.

He ate breakfast with the kids and before leaving he helped Clem lay his parka on the floor and watched him bend over and push his arms into the sleeves and lift the coat over his head and don it. It struck Henry that this is how the search and rescue technicians slip on their helicopter vests.

He got in his car and decided to find that performance artist and tell her about soldiers dying but the gallery was not open. So he drove up to Signal Hill. He watched a limousine pour out
a wedding party in a blizzard. The bride in her white gown and two men almost on their knees grabbing at the hem. My god, is the world going to rub it in? Someone getting married, not him. But he had enough reserve to cheer. Behind them, down at Fort Amherst, the white lighthouse and below that the old fortifications from two world wars. The lighthouse is a seagull and the grey fortifications are its young, camouflaged against the rock. What did that suggest? The fledglings of our own birth arise from a militaristic past.

21

An hour up the shore in wicked snow conditions. In Newfoundland, south is up. Henry had the radio on for company, stopping in the Goulds to fill a grocery cart and withdraw cash from a bank machine. When he got back out to the parking lot the afternoon was dark.

The radio helped him drive the slow road out to Renews. The wind lifted the car off the road. This driving in the winter reminded him of touring through Afghanistan, the road our convoys took south of Kabul towards Kandahar. Not that he's an expert, but one does experience things even when one is in a foreign situation ever briefly. Sand and snow both obliterate a landscape, turn it into something artificial, or a borrowed place. It does no harm to pollute this sort of landscape. Renews in winter was the Kandahar of Newfoundland, if you can think of the island as a Pashtun province and the Atlantic ocean standing in for Pakistan, which was a thought right up Henry's alley. Tender died at home. The difference in the world rests mainly in moisture and latitude.

He saw then lost the lighthouse beacon out on the head. The
snow and the dark. Being driven to a place is much different than driving there yourself. The world involved in its own copulation.

The side road was ploughed and the headlights lit up the high banks of snow along the road. There'd been a lot of weather out here since the funeral, or at least a lot of snow had drifted in from the sea. There was no place to park except on the road. He left the car running and knocked on a neighbour's door. The house front encased in a new brick veneer. An elderly man in a clean shirt leaned himself up in the doorframe and Henry remembered John telling him that this was Baxter Penney. He could feel the tremendous heat from a woodstove barrel out the open door, the heat had a density to it. Baxter Penney looked over at Henry's idling car, the confident shafts of headlight catching the descent of snow and said he could store that car in the lee of his barn. Baxter's house and barn and driveway were lit up by a five-hundred-watt outdoor lamp that beamed a cruel anti-criminal light on the neatly shovelled lot and the brick veneer siding. How did you come to settle on brick?

The answer to that, Baxter said, wears a dress.

Henry parked the car and shut off the engine and, for the first time, realized he was now at the mercy of the sound of weather. The ocean was roaring. He crossed the road to John's summer house and jumped the snowbank and plunged into darkness and noisy wind. He'd never been here in winter, only a handful of times in summer.

He waded through hip-high snow to the storm door and knocked the ice from the padlock. The key. He had it in his pocket. The shackle of the lock leapt out of the chamber and that was very satisfying. Inside he tried the porch light but it did not work and he reached into the kitchen and that switch did not
work either. He kicked off his boots and felt around for the fuse box and it took ten minutes to discover it out in the front porch. He pushed on the main breaker and the lights came on. Artificial light that you have no part in creating, the system of deliverance of light is one of the cheeriest joys of the past hundred years.