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Turned out Hawk’s dad worked there afternoons. There was a big weight room with all kinds of free weights, benches and a mammoth Nautilus. There were electronic programmable stationary bicycles and rowing machines. And saunas and whirlpools, the whole works. Because afternoons were the slow time, Hawk’s dad let us work out there after school.

So I started weight training. Almost every day. Hawk showed me the routines and his dad told me what to eat. “You got to take in tons of protein when you weight train,” he said. And gradually, slowly, my skinniness went away. My chest was more than a bag of bones, my arms touched the cloth on the sleeves of my shirts, my legs didn’t look like paddle handles. By the time I made grade nine at Lakeshore Collegiate I was pretty well built, or at least well on the way.

And I didn’t mind being called Wick any more. In fact, I kind of liked it.

I
SPENT THE AFTERNOON ON THE ROCK
by the water, swimming and reading a thick novel called
Shogun
. The old man came down for a while and splashed around like a wounded duck. Seeing him in his bathing suit, I realized he wasn’t so thin after all. His muscles were small but knotty and wiry, like cables—the way a guy gets when he works but doesn’t do weights. He still looked pretty wimpy, though.

Later on in the afternoon, while the old man was cleaning the acne-van’s spark plugs, I put on my trainers and took a half-hour run along the dirt road that twists and turns through the park. I jogged along just fast enough to keep ahead of the mosquitoes and blackflies that hovered in the shady areas looking for tourist blood. It was a pretty big park, although there weren’t many campers—just a few families and a couple of RVs with old people sitting outside in lawn chairs reading the paper. When I got back to our campsite I took a last swim and dressed.

By that time the old man had a small fire going in the fire pit beside the picnic table and there was a pot of stew and a coffee pot sitting on the rocks at the edge of the flames. I didn’t know why he cooked on a fire instead of the stove in the van and I didn’t ask.

After dinner, as it grew dark and cool enough to keep the bugs down, we sat beside the fire and the old man opened another beer and started asking me all kinds of questions about school and stuff like that—the kind of questions asked at Christmas time by aunts and uncles you haven’t seen for a year or so. I answered him as best I could without telling him anything personal. I tried to work up the nerve to ask him something about himself but I failed. The time didn’t seem right.

Then he started asking about Mom. He was fishing around with small talk but I knew what he was after. Finally he got to the point.

“Does she go out much?”

The truth was, she didn’t go out at all, unless it was some office party. As far as I knew she had dated twice, maybe three times while I was growing up, but the guys never showed up again.

When I got older I wondered about it. I mean, my mother wasn’t a beauty queen but she was pretty good-looking. And she always dressed well, never made a move without her make-up on. But no men in her life. I knew she must have been lonely. Just then I felt a twitch of guilt. Maybe it was me that was holding her back. Maybe she gave up men because, with me and her job, she didn’t have time.

“No, she’s pretty busy,” I said.

“Yeah, she’s done okay for herself.”

“She sure has. She’s the top accountant for the company. She also made some money on the stock market; she’s pretty smart that way. That’s when she bought the condo.”

“Nice car she drives, too.”

I caught a tone in his comment that I didn’t like. “Well, why not? She earned it,” I said.

“Course she did. But she never had no steady guy, eh?”

“Not really.”

“Too busy, like you said.”

“Yeah.”

The old man looked into the fire for a moment. Then he took another pull on the beer can and said, more to himself than to me, “Maybe nobody can meet her standards.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

“Nothin’. Forget it. I was just talkin’ to my—”

I stood up. “I’m going to bed.”

He gave me an apologetic look and nodded. “Okay. ’Night.”

I climbed into the top bed, took off my clothes and got into my sleeping bag. I wasn’t tired but no way was I going to sit there and listen to him talk about my mother like that. Maybe I had to travel with him but I didn’t have to take any crap from him.

He stayed at the fire for a long time.

Hawk and I called his house the United Nations because his dad was half-black, born in New York, his mom came over from Viet Nam when she was four, and Hawk was a short white kid from who-knows-where.

I liked it at Hawk’s house. His parents were low-key, easygoing types. They published a local weekly
newspaper called
Good News
, which they started up when Hawk was little because they were sick and tired of all the gloom-and-doom, wars and disasters and dirty politics of the major papers. Hawk’s parents figured more good things happened in the world than bad things but we never get to hear about them.
Good News
contained only positive stories, like fund-raising campaigns for the Queensway General Hospital, scholarships won by local students, environmental stuff and a Citizen of the Week citation. I sort of agreed, but, to tell the truth, the paper was a little boring. Maybe that was why it didn’t bring in much advertising revenue and Mr. Richardson had to work at the health club. Mrs. Richardson, a small thin feisty lady, wrote most of the stories.

Hawk’s house was the opposite of ours. My mother and I got along okay most of the time, but our house always seemed to have an atmosphere of tension. I remember reading a story called “The Rockinghorse Winner” where this little kid named Paul thought he heard voices coming out of the walls saying, “There
must
be more money; there
must
be more money.” I’m not saying our place was that bad, but, like I’ve said before, my mother’s two big goals were making lots of money and keeping up appearances. Our new condo was carpeted everywhere and full of costly new furniture that didn’t look very inviting. In the downstairs bathroom were vases of dried flowers and baskets of little rose-shaped soap cakes on the back of the toilet beside the can of aerosal air-freshener. Is that pretentious, or what?

Hawk’s house was calm and comfortable. The dishes didn’t match, the furniture was worn, and the rugs were threadbare. There was nothing fancy or put-on
about his house or the people who lived in it. I guess that was why I spent so much time there—that and the fact that Hawk was my best friend.

T
HE DEAFENING CHIRPS
of a thousand excited birds woke me up the next morning to the smells of frying bacon and fresh coffee. I wasn’t supposed to like either one of them—Coach Leonard’s orders—because coffee does all manner of subtle damage to the body and bacon contains nitrites, which are bad too, but I forget why.

Coach Leonard was totally rabid about all that stuff. He looked it, too. He was small, muscular, wore his hair super-short and had a hard single-minded stare. That’s why we called him the Fanatic. I’d hate to have faced him on the mat. He once told me that when you grow up Jewish in a Gentile neighbourhood in Toronto you get tough or you get beaten up a lot.

He demanded a lot from us and he was always preaching about proper diet as well as proper training. Hawk had been converted long before—his parents had always been granola and alfalfa-sprout types—except for his carrot muffin habit. I followed the Fanatic’s regime. I had to if I wanted to stay on the wrestling team and, besides, I thought he was right.

I rolled over in the bunk and stared at the camper’s slanted ceiling, letting my nose enjoy the forbidden aromas. The more I thought about it, the more I realized everybody I knew was paranoid about
what they ate. My mother was always on one kind of diet or other, the water diet, the banana diet, the no-protein total-carbo diet, the non-carbohydrate total-protein diet. Last year she joined one of those weight-loss support groups and came home every week drowned in guilt. The thing is, she wasn’t fat and never had been.

And a lot of the girls at school got totally boring about the whole thing. My friend Sara was always saying, “I’m so
fat!”
as if she could hardly get through the door. She looked just fine to me. All the girls seemed to be dieting. They’d rather have been dead than overweight. They all wanted to look like those flat-chested concentration camp types that model in magazines. They wanted to be hangers—that’s what they called models. Even when Sara’s best friend checked into the hospital with a case of anorexia and almost died, Sara said to me she secretly wished she could be anorexic for a few months so she could get her weight down.

“Down to what?” I had asked her. “Who wants to go out with a bag of bones?”

She told me I didn’t understand. Right on, Sara. Go forward three spaces.

Anyway, I didn’t want to lie there any longer thinking about Sara, so I crawled out of the sleeping bag, pulled on my damp bathing suit and went down to the lake. The old man was standing by the calm green water, leaning against a thick birch, barefoot, bare-chested, looking out toward the islands. He didn’t have a beer in his hand or his pipe in his mouth, so I figured he hadn’t been up long.

I felt uneasy about last night and tried to think of something to say to smooth things over.

He beat me to it. “Nice day, eh?” He tore a loose piece of bark from the birch and began to work it with his hands like a piece of leather.

“Yeah, great. Coming in?”

“Nope. Had my dip already.”

“Oh.”

I dove in and started to stroke out toward the horizon.

“Don’t go out too far,” he shouted after me. “Breakfast is ready.”

Soon we were on the road again. It looked like another great day, and except for the pipe smoke and the horrible music—country and western this time—I half-enjoyed myself.

We continued north on 69 under a blue sky decorated with slow-moving ice-cream clouds that broke the sun’s glare every few minutes. I caught the odd glimpse of Georgian Bay on the left before we swung inland and crossed the French River on a big silver trestle bridge. We made Sudbury about ten and the old man took the turn-off into town.

“Have to buy some food,” he said.

Coming into Sudbury is like coming into any town, I guess. You have to drive past all the junk-food places—hamburgers, a million flavours of ice-cream, pizza, chicken massacred in various ways, fish and chip stores that always look like they’re about five minutes from bankruptcy—and then the malls with huge ugly signs and parking lots that stretch on forever. The buildings in Sudbury seemed to be carrying on a losing fight with the ugly black rock that poked up everywhere through the thin soil.

The old man turned in to a little mall and parked he van between two pick-up trucks in front of a store.

“I thought you wanted groceries,” I said.

“Right.” He looked hesitant as he shut off the notor.

“This is a
drug
store.” I pointed to the big sign with I.D.A. painted in red half-metre-high letters on a white background. “You want the IGA, right?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Pretty stupid. Guess my mind was somewhere else.”

The old man started up the van and we drove around some more. He stopped three times to ask for directions, looking for a food store, squinting through the windshield like a pensioner. Finally he pulled into another mall where there was a little IGA store.

“You don’t need to come in,” he said. “I’ll only be a sec.”

“I think I will. I’d like to stretch my legs.”

Big mistake. I thought shopping with Mom was frustrating. The old man grabbed a cart, one with a wheel that flapped like a demented sparrow, and walked to one side of the store.

He moved up and down the aisles, squinting at the cans, bottles and bags lined up on the shelves, as if he was trying to memorize all the labels. After about ten minutes I said, “What are you looking for, anyway?”

“Oh, soup, stew, like that,” he said vaguely.

“Is there something you want me to get, maybe save some time?”

He was dropping cans with big coloured pictures of stew on the labels into the cart. “No, it’s okay. I think of things I need as I go along. Why don’t you wait
outside in the van? I won’t be long.”

He seemed anxious to do his shopping without me around, so I figured fine, he wants to be alone, that’s okay with me. He came out about half an hour later, weighed down by shopping bags, just as I was ready to die from boredom.

After a quick stop at the beer store, which he found easily enough, we were on the road again, rumbling past the slag heaps and the pinkish granite rocks that stretched away from the highway toward the big chimney that dominates the city.

Once out of Sudbury we were heading into the afternoon sun. We drove for over an hour, through towns with fascinating names like Whitefish, Massey and Spanish, before the old man took a right onto a secondary road. Not far along he turned into another campground, this one called Chutes Provincial Park. I knew from my four years of totally boring French classes that a
chute
is a waterfall, so I figured this might be a pretty spot. Sure enough, as soon as the old man pulled into a campsite and the rumble of the broken muffler died away, I could hear the falls.

I got out, stretched the kinks out of my back and followed a path through a stand of evergreens toward the distant roar, waving the bugs away as I walked. The path opened onto a small sand beach on a tiny lake—more like a pond—of slow-moving dark water flecked with foam. The shore opposite was lit up by the afternoon sun. At the far end of the pond was a small waterfall gushing over a rock shelf. At the nearer end the pond narrowed into a small river that rushed away into the bush.

I went back to the van and put on my bathing suit. The old man was brewing up some coffee on the stove, puffing on his pipe, filling the van with foul-smelling smoke, and humming to himself. I headed for the pond.