The Push & the Pull (31 page)

“All right,” Stan said, palpably intrigued by Paul's offer, “when do you finger the horseflesh?”

“Now. This is it. Just me and a pen. And we actually have an office staff. Call this number and they'll type your résumé.”

“You do realize my billy club will need Sure Grips.”

“We leave the billy clubs to the officers. Somebody has to hire wrestling fans.”

When Paul — no longer a Kingstonian but another Ottawa bureaucrat — returned to the same kitchen a dozen years later, Andrew sat on the floor of an upstairs hallway to listen. Of course he couldn't see through walls and floors, but he felt Paul down there in a kitchen so unchanged from the night of the job offer to this, its opposite. Paul's even, timbrous voice floated past tired wallpaper and glasses gone cloudy in an aging dishwasher. The kitchens of Paul's other friends had, no doubt, gone through this decade with more redecorating than pullout shelves, long-tab sink taps and photoelectric light switches.

“Stan, we can get you early retirement without a second glance. We can get you a farewell bottle on the government tab.”

“Are you selling anything I might actually want?”

Paul paused. Managerial oil squirted into the room. “They'll deal to a point. A voluntary acceptance will get you the full package without any long-term disability. We're talking substantial money here.”

“I see. Is Roger also getting a package for his rubber elbow? The guys have a betting pool on when Henry will snap. Nimble I'm not, but at least I teach. Amendment number two: I teach well.”

“Nobody's denying that.”

“Come again? You've got a team of drunks and losers sliding their way to divorce number three or four. Behind the plate, I'm as good as I've ever been.”

“When you're there.”

“Slow, yes. Poor attendance, never. I'd have to be able to feel, to feel bad.”

“Stan, every trip to the bathroom, and every minute it lasts, is a liability. The feeling is, the strong feeling is, that you dilute officer time. Even at the halfways, they want maximum readiness.”

“Keep that doublespeak away from me.”

“Call it whatever you want. Their union's lodging a complaint.”

“Why, because suddenly I've dropped below the fitness level necessary to fend off a career bruiser who pumps iron five hours a day? What kind of locks do you have on your house, Paul? You got infrared? Your windows all wired? I didn't think so. We get by on chance, pal. I didn't get this job for my drop kick. Why the hell should I get fired for losing something I've never had?”

“You're not getting fired; you're getting freedom. Take the package, the strong package, and volunteer with adult literacy or an immigration centre.”

“Fuck off and get out.”

Paul did. Upstairs, Andrew knew the imperious face that had just been turned from Paul's, knew the feel of his quiet exile.

Andrew didn't wait very long, or apologize for overhearing, or say that adult literacy sounded heavenly compared to daily masturbation jokes and ketchup wine. He walked in and put his hand on his father's falcate shoulder to say, “We can fight it.”

“And what do we win?”

He wakes up keen to steal. Beneath the foil kaffiyeh his hair is damp with sweat. He thinks of removing the blanket to lick it. One way or another, he'll eat tonight.

Betty, I'm the person you've hated or been afraid of every waking moment since your plane touched down. You wear that stained money belt because of the length of my fingers, the reach of my appetite.

First he needs clothes. One shirt, possibly new shoes, and he'd be incognito. How long is his radius of infamy? Maybe it stops in Rivière-du-Loup. If 132 kilometres won't spare him, what will? (You know what will: 400 k, 500.) Again, police or thugs? If every gas station in the province is looking for
un cycliste caucasien avec les cheveux auburn, chemise pictographique de rouge et bleu
, then he eats garbage, steals table scraps from beneath cold coffee grounds, forages for a restaurant's cornucopia packed in dirty napkins. If the campsite punks are after him themselves, do they even have a car? Are they stopping at
every
store? And the cops, what, have they put a bird in the sky? Telephoned everyone who sells power drinks and chocolate bars?

Choose poorly, get weak and your life is very, very different, undeniably lesser. Be lazy or careless and you get stomped or a criminal record. With a criminal record, you won't be able to leave the country. A hundred times with Betty he reluctantly chose not to leave Canada. Now that a departure is threatened, he'd go in a second.

To walk into a store for food, he needs different clothing. To get clothing, he must find laundry to steal, but only after night has fallen fully. He needs laundry left out on a country clothesline. Have gone to bed without bringing in the laundry. Have fucked. Be drunk. Have had a child shriek in fever. Anything to leave your threads strung out.

Brash stealing, a sudden theft with opportunity knocking on his door would be so much easier. Instead he must hunt and wait, all the while maddened by his empty stomach. He's too hungry to have slept
from dawn until dusk and must now endure a few more hours of evening sunlight before he can begin to search out clothes and food to steal. He busies himself walking through his woods looking for water to drink. The groundwater he slurps from a brook sluices countless bacteria into his gut, but it's that or more nothing. Ultimately, he spends nearly three hours simply lying on the ground beside the stream, drinking whenever he can. His hunger is both similar to and opposite from meditation. In ways, everything but his stomach fades from his consciousness, and yet he is too tightly focused on this one growling, grumbling, squirting little bag.

Eventually, he can see himself lying there on the twiggy stream bank as if he were looking down from the treetops. This is the image he would file in court as proof of his guilty mind, what Larry taught him to call his
mens rea
. The simple fact of him patiently waiting for nightfall, enduring hours of utter boredom, even sharpening his already sharp hunger to do so: this is premeditation.

When dusk finally falls, he returns to the bike, the evil twin. Together they ride. Pausing his straight flight west, he begins a spiral forage for neglected laundry. If this laundry hunt goes on too long it may threaten his already precarious night route west. Since Rivière-du-Loup, luck or possibly francophone history have had him on a route he's sure is parallel to the St. Lawrence and the Trans-Can. He'd like to think he remembers some fifteen-year-old history lesson in which the farm lots in New France were cut back in narrow strips from the St. Lawrence. One road then another and another punctuated the ends of the lots and ran parallel to the river. Should these roads exist, should he be remembering history and not Québécois folklore or, worse, fiction, they will be perfect for his planned series of night flights but also make his current laundry search a long one. The first hour of tonight's ride is spent cruising along one country road, then back along another. All this pedalling and no distance gained.

My kingdom for a sweatshirt. Or a toque.
Toque
: a Canadian word, a Canadian necessity. Bike into a store and one is yours. Again, warmth or secrecy?

When he does eventually find a laden clothesline he must wait again until the house looks quiet with sleep. So much time waiting beside trees with a growling stomach. How do criminals stand the
boredom? Finally, circling back past midnight, the boredom vanishes. Creeping around the side of the small house, he picks his way around plastic toys littering the lawn as if he were stepping through a minefield. Rounding the corner into the back, he tries to keep his eyes open, glancing at everything save for the clothes he wants. Already, associative logic makes him salivate at peripheral glimpses of civilian clothing. Look left for a light coming on inside or a figure at the window. Check right for a lunging dog. By the time he reaches the clothesline, he's nearly ready to settle on the first thing he can grab. Ah yes, a powder blue nightie would be perfect. Trying to squeeze out courage as he moves down the line, he eventually recognizes his luck. This is family washday, two loads left here for the country night. Litters of socks. Boy's jockeys. Doll-sized panties. Broad jeans. Past halfway he finally sees this lemon-scented portrait of divorce. The clothes of a boy, a younger girl and their mother; another couple of kids growing up without men.

Mom offers him a pair of track pants and junior an oversized sweatshirt. In for a penny, ruined by a southern itch, he grabs — okay, two — pairs of mom's neglected, utile underwear. Half a kilometre away he stops to pull on the loot. The sweatshirt has room for his chest, but he has to cut off the sleeves. Its warmth feels like an embrace. And who cares how ugly and ill-fitting it seems? This is North America. No fashion is impossible.

For his itchy nethers, he slides one foot then the other into the panties. Don't look down. Although they settle worse than a German swimsuit, although contents may soon spill container, he's prepared to use almost anything to ease his chafe. Perhaps they'll allow his cream to sit for longer. Off the bike the mom panties would divide more than they contain, as if a ribbon were trying to cradle two kiwis, but in the cramped geometry of the saddle this narrow cotton is just wall enough. Opening the cuffs of the sweatpants with his knife, he steps into the world's least fashionable culottes then caps them with the wet hiking shorts. The spare panties go in a pocket and are his only luxury. A bandage, a handkerchief, tomorrow's freshness.

Right. In-cog-nito.

By the time Betty fled Andrew and his mother at the restaurant, they knew each other's class schedules intimately. Whether she wanted to leave him or not, she knew where and when he'd grab a coffee between Transgendered Transnational Fiction and lANguAge poETry. He knew when she worked out and that she wore skirts to The Art of Time, pants to Technology and Ritual and tighter pants to Performance Art, the class with the tall, thin TA with a half-beard who was always going on about Fra-hance and Brooklyn.

If she had stayed in Kingston and not gone home to Elaine's, she'd certainly be going to class again after two days, so he waited for her outside of her Film class with the bag of books and clothes he'd packed for her. Arriving early, standing still and waiting while other students came and went, he himself felt like a six-foot strip of photographic film. The sway of Betty's hair, the cut of her collar and every movement of hip or eye burnt indelibly into him. Condemnation, reproach, spite and perhaps disdain polished the facets of her cheekbones and sharpened the blade of her jaw. She slowed but continued as she saw him. He concentrated on her eyebrows, watched them grow from distant chevrons into individuated lines then precise fossils. Unable to wait for her first words he held up both palms. The pack slid down to the crook of his elbow. He waved his arm to indicate the laden bag.

“Underwear, clothes, books. No strings attached,” he said.

“Fine. Thanks.”

“Decide if you want to meet me later.” He handed her the bag, brushing her hand just once before walking off. She wouldn't countenance distraction before class, so his brief note would go unread for at least an hour. The note —
It gets worse.
— sat like a time bomb in her bag, but she, not he, controlled its clock.

He went grocery shopping while she was still in class, then cleaned
the house maniacally. Finally, he sat down to some neglected reading and green tea, not beer. She phoned at a noncommittal 8:30 p.m.

“You were definitely in better shape before I read your note. Why should I track you down with more questions?”

“I can't tell you, Betty. Not, I won't. I can't. I can show you one more thing — really, just one — that might make a little sense of why I would lie so much when I love you so much.”

The pause ached.

“Come meet me,” she said. “JJ's.”

“Give me an inch and I take a mile, I know, but I need to show you. Here.”

“This is totally unfair.”

“I agree. You don't even have to step in. I'm not trying to trick you. Please come to the door.” He could hear her breathe. “Can I meet you and we'll walk back here?”

“Okay,” she finally said.

His breathing resumed.

Awkward question, given the tiring circumstances, but he does wonder as he rides who will be the face of justice for his campsite kick. Did the punks ditch his stuff then claim a cyclist had randomly attacked them? No, that wouldn't show la Sûreté that they want a touring cyclist, someone headed out of town. And look at those kids. They had
asshole
written all over them. Young little takers. Then again, they also look like future cops. And what about the fact that he's
maudit anglais
? In rural Quebec, is that more likely to let slip the dogs of justice?

Running would be so much easier if he knew that he absolutely
had
to run. Running
just in case
taxes his patience and widens a grey area of doubt about what's possible and prudent. If there were police choppers in the sky and cops at roadblocks he'd bike across fields or portage down streams. As is, he knows two things: (1) he'll do what it takes to see Betty again, and (2) he's finally able to drink chocolate milk. First daylight then traffic thicken around him. By the time he spots a gas station, it's early morning: late for a fugitive but early enough for some people heading to work.

Peeling paint on a wooden garage and the one hand-drawn digit on the price board for gasoline hopefully say
out of the loop
. Then again, a phone call's a phone call. He's six feet of dirt in absurd clothing. Little work would be required to see him riding off on a bicycle. At least, he'll have been fed.

He approaches in the midst of a little morning rush of single men who idle their trucks and yell jokes across the parking lot to one another. Andrew parks the bike by the garage's air hose, a move both natural and concealing, then walks across the parking lot to join the small lineup of men who prefer to drive for a takeout coffee that costs ten times what it would cost to make at home provided they could stand the company.