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The old man wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Sharon got up and stood behind him and held his shoulders. He looked into his coffee, then at me.

“I’m sorry, Steve. Maybe I should have fought her. But I knew I’d lose, and I couldn’t stand it if everybody knew. They’d have laughed at me. They’d’ve thought I was nothin’. I’d hid it for my whole life, I was so ashamed. From everybody. Even from your mother.
You meant everythin’ to me. I was your hero, I knew that. How could I face my little boy, him knowin’ his dad was an illiterate idiot?

“It broke my heart, leavin’ you, Steve. It broke my heart.”

I felt the tears come as Replays flashed into my mind and I saw myself waiting for him to come back home, ripping up the postcards, shoving my BMX off the trestle into the river. Missing him and hating him at the same time.

I looked at Sharon. She held tight to my father’s shaking shoulders. Her eyes were telling me what to do. I stood up, stepped over to my father. Sharon backed away and I put my arms around him and he grabbed me hard around the waist, burying his face in my chest.

“I missed you, Dad,” I said.

E
VEN THOUGH
I
WAS TIRED
from chopping and stacking firewood I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. My mind was going full tilt, like those big computer banks in the old sci-fi movies, different-coloured lights flashing without a rest.

I couldn’t get up and watch the tube the way I’d do at home because the TV was too close to the bedroom—everything in Sharon’s house was close to everything else—and I’d wake Dad and Sharon up. I figured they both deserved some rest. Dad was pretty wrung-out and Sharon must have been, too.

So I lay there and thrashed around, bashing my pillow a thousand times, twisting the bedding into a tangle, getting more and more frustrated trying to fall asleep. Finally I gave up and let the thoughts run.

For the first time in my life I thought about how hard it must have been for my father when he left home. He had wandered all over North America, it seemed like. I wondered about the places he had been to, how he had supported himself—any kind of job he could pick up, I guessed. There were lots of things I didn’t know about him. Ten years’ worth of things. Like, how do you fake not being able to read or write? How do you fake it so well that even your wife and kid don’t know?

I’m not saying my mind was full of warm happy thoughts about him. Like I told him, I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to forgive him for leaving. I knew the reasons now, but that didn’t make the hurt go away. Explaining stuff doesn’t always make it better.

Now there was someone else to be mad at. My mother. It was pretty cruel, what she did to him and to me. Because there was no doubt that, if a divorce judge had asked me when I was seven who I wanted to live with, I know who I’d have picked. Maybe she knew that, knew she might lose her little boy, and that’s why she threatened him.

I remember one time in English when Ms. Cake told us—I forget why—the Bible story of the two women who were fighting over a baby. Each woman claimed the kid was hers, and they went to court to get a decision. Solomon, the crafty king-judge, said the only thing to do was cut the baby in two and give each woman half a kid. Then they’d both be satisfied.

One woman said, great idea. But, the other one was horrified. She said no, she changed her mind, it wasn’t her baby after all. Solomon knew then that she was the real mother, and he awarded the kid to her.

Well, nice story, but that’s all it was—a story. Real life didn’t work that way. In real life people would say yeah, cut him up. Then they’d argue about who got the biggest piece.

Parents. They teach you not to be selfish, but when it comes to losing something they can be worse than kids. Except we have to admit it and they don’t.

I rolled over for the thousandth time and punched my pillow again, wishing I could punch both my parents that easily.

Oh, hell, I thought, what makes you so perfect, Wick? It was just a big tragedy for everybody. There was nobody to blame. It was runny in a way. It was nobody’s fault, but everybody got hurt anyway, everybody got cut in half And everybody was alone—a seven-year-old who didn’t know what was going on; his mother, working like a mad-woman to be a big success, living up to her parents’ standards, with no husband or social life; his father, wandering around by himself, sending postcards he couldn’t write on to a son he couldn’t visit.

Loneliness, I realized, is the worst feeling in the world, worse than pain, worse than anything. Especially when no one else understands, when no one else seems to care.

And then, as if someone had slammed me in the back of the head with one of the slabs of firewood I had cut that afternoon, it hit me—the terrible isolation and loneliness that Hawk must have felt that day in the shower room when he told me his secret. There I was, rambling on inside my head about how my father had left me rather than face up to his illiteracy, feeling mad at him, saying I wasn’t sure I could forgive him. And what had I done to Hawk?

“The same damn thing,” I said aloud. “Worse. A lot worse.” My voice bounced off the walls in the dark room, accusing me. I was his best friend, and when he told me his deepest secret, when he needed me most, I had run off and left him blubbering in the corner of the shower room.

I got out of bed and went to the phone. I punched in the Toronto area code, then Hawk’s number.

It rang about eight times and I was about to hang up when someone answered.

“Hello?” It was Hawk’s voice, and yet it wasn’t. It was weak and timid, the voice of a grade one kid talking to the principal.

I stood paralyzed, wondering what to say. Think of something! I told myself. I took a deep breath.

“Stop doing this!” Hawk screamed before I could talk. “Leave me alone! I’ve had enough, you bastards!” He slammed down the phone.

I stood there staring at the receiver until it sank in that he hadn’t known it was me. Who did he think it was? Then I knew. All the guys on the wrestling team had seen the pictures. It would have been all over the school the next day. Hawk Richardson is gay. The Athlete of the Year is a fag.

And Wick Chandler is his best friend.

I
SPENT THE NEXT FEW DAYS
moping around, not doing much. My father went into town to his show twice a day—he came back to Sharon’s for lunch—and sometimes I went with him and hung around the mall. That got boring after a while, though. Sometimes I cut firewood for Sharon. I mowed the lawn for her, which would have made my mother die of shock if she ever found out. Sharon’s smile was hard to resist, though.

I had a couple of good talks with Sharon. Once, as we sat in lawn chairs in the shade of the oak tree in her yard, she told me about how she met my father. It had happened a little over five years before, in Sault Ste. Marie. She had been working in an arts and crafts store just north of the city and he had come in, peddling his sculptures. They talked a bit, she said, and he came back the next day. And the day after that.

“What attracted me to your dad was his gentleness,” she said. “You know, this town is full of macho types, full of swagger and loud talk. Your dad isn’t like that.”

I asked her why they didn’t live together permanently.

“He hasn’t been able to settle down, Wick, and I’m not going to force him. Used to be, he just wanted to be on the move. But now he’s an established artist. Not famous, but he’s becoming known in certain places. So
now he has to do a certain amount of travelling. But he isn’t gone for very long, and he always comes back here. Besides, I have an idea that he’ll find it easier to settle down now.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“I do too. Because when—or if—he does, I’m going to take another whack at getting him to go back to school.”

I pictured my father in a classroom slouching in his chair with his moccasined feet stuck out in the aisle, puffing on his pipe and mumbling comments to himself while the teacher rambled on about verbs and nouns.

“That would be great,” I said, “but do you think he’d go?”

“I don’t know. I’ve tried to get him to sign up with one of those literacy programs you see advertised in the paper every now and then. But so far he’s resisted. Says he’s too busy, but that’s only part of it. He still has a lot of anger inside about his experiences in school. And before he goes back to school he has to admit to other people that he has a problem. Your dad’s an awfully proud man, Wick.”

“Sharon, do you mind if I ask you something else?”

“Go ahead.”

“How did you find out?”

She shrugged. “Well, after we discovered we loved each other, he told me there was something I should know before we got real serious. Said he’d made a big mistake once and he wasn’t going to make it again. I was expecting him to say he had a drug problem or that he’d been in jail, anything but the fact that he couldn’t read or write. I was the first person he’d ever admitted it to.” She smiled. “You’re the second, Wick.”

“But … don’t take this wrong, but didn’t it change the way you thought of him?”

“I was shocked, naturally—I mean, he hid it so well. But, no, it didn’t change anything between us. He’s the same man I fell in love with.”

To keep in shape I did my exercises and went for a run every morning. I was getting nervous again about the meet and didn’t want to lose my training edge. The problem was, the exercises made me think of Hawk, since we almost always did them together at school, and the runs gave me too much time to think. Running is great if you want to get away from everyone and think about something, maybe thrash out a problem, but when you don’t want to think, running is a drag.

A dozen times I picked up the phone to call Hawk, and a dozen times I put it down again.

E
ARLY
M
ONDAY MORNING
we said goodbye to Sharon and left for Thunder Bay. Dad had got the van tuned up—he sold a lot of sculptures over the weekend and had a few bucks to spend—and replaced the muffler himself. I told him if he was going to play opera on the stereo it might be better to have the muffler the way it was.

The Trans-Canada Highway took us up the east shore of Lake Superior. The mountains and the lake combined to produce some terrific scenery, with sweeping deep blue bays and mountainous peninsulas. My father seemed to know where he was going. I asked him if he had been this way before and he said yes.

“But what about the first time?” I asked. “I mean, how do you find your way around?” Another thought struck me. “And how did you find your way around in all the travelling you did?”

He didn’t say anything at first and I began to wonder if I had embarrassed him. “Do you mind me asking you?”

“I guess if you’d asked me a couple weeks ago I’d’ve said yes, but now it’s kind of a relief, bein’ able to talk about it. Hidin’ stuff is high pressure, you know?

“If you can’t read, you’ve gotta get by with word of mouth, you’ve gotta ask directions all the time. People naturally tell me street names, thinkin’ I’ll find the signs,
so I ask them about landmarks—you know, a gas station or a big grey building, whatever. I can read numbers, as long as they’re not too long, so I can follow a map because all the highways are numbered. If I’m goin’ somewhere, I count the towns I’ll pass through on the way. Then when I think I’m where I want to be, I stop at a gas station or a restaurant and shoot the breeze for a few minutes and then say, ‘What town is this, anyway? I missed the sign.’ ” He smiled around the stem of his pipe. “You get to meet a lot of people that way.

“If somebody gives me somethin’ to read,” he went on, “I tell them I forgot my glasses. I usually carry an empty glasses case in my pocket. That works most of the time. At the show, there, back in the Soo, I did the glasses routine quite a bit, told the gallery people Sharon was my business manager and acted the part of the harebrained artist who doesn’t understand worldly things like bills or money or commissions.”

He chuckled, and held the steering wheel tightly while a huge transport truck loaded with logs roared past, shaking the van like a paper box, but his laugh had a bitter edge to it.

“In school I failed grade one and two. ’Course, they didn’t hold me back. I went on to the next grade. I knew I’d failed, and all the other kids knew, and the teacher pretended I hadn’t, but I had.

“So, you know, I felt kind of bad about myself. I didn’t have no confidence. No matter how hard I tried, nothin’ seemed to work. One of my teachers used to get on my case, tellin’ me I had a lazy mind. I guess I don’t blame her now. It must’ve been awful frustratin’, tryin to get me to read and write.

“Anyway, feelin’ bad about myself like that, I got into a lot of trouble. Fights, talkin back to the teachers, not doin any work because I couldn’t write. The usual. Things didn’t change too much when they finally pushed me into high school. I earned some credits in the couple of years I was there—arts, phys ed, a few shops. But I spent most of my time skippin’ classes, and when I turned sixteen I was gone.

“See, even though school was failure after failure, inside I knew I was better than that. I knew I could draw—it was the only time I ever got good marks in elementary school—and I knew I wasn’t stupid. But most of the time I felt lonely. I felt like I was standin’ on the outside of a high chain-link fence, and I could see all the other kids, all the other adults, playin’, workin’, gettin’ along with a normal life, but I couldn’t get in. I still can’t. It isn’t like the gate’s locked. It’s like there isn’t a gate at all.”

He struck a match on the underside of the steering column and lit his pipe, then stuffed the match into the pile of other matches in the ashtray.

“So anyways,” he said through a cloud of smoke, “what the hell. After I quit school I got along. I found jobs. If I had to fill out an application I’d take it home and get my mom to help me with it. Or I’d go after jobs where they’d just as soon pay you under the table, so there was no application. Thing is, though, all those jobs were the same—lousy pay and no benefits. And every day you’re thinkin’, is this the day they’re goin’ to find out about me and fire me?