Parallel Rivers Read online

  PARALLEL RIVERS

  PARALLEL RIVERS

  MICHAEL KENYON

  ©Michael Kenyon, 2014

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Accesss Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  410 2nd Avenue North

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kenyon, Michael, 1953-, author

  Parallel rivers / Michael Kenyon.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927068-82-3 (pbk.).– ISBN 978-1-77187-014-6 (html).–

  ISBN 978-1-77187-015-3 (pdf )

  I. Title.

  PS8571.E67P37 2014 C813’.54C2014-905349-5

  C2014-905350-9

  Cover photo: Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica, 2001

  NASA, California Jet Propulsion Laboratory

  www.jpl.nasa.gov

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  Before starting the edit he spent days just looking at the rolls of film, without opening them. It wasn’t a performance. He was on his own. Just looking at the boxes.

  — Jean-Claude Carrière on Jean-Luc Godard

  CONTENTS

  THEATRICAL REMOVALS

  Mercenary

  Canaries Sing in Russian Airspace

  Red Clay

  Train

  Brick and Rivet and Lime

  Twenty Nights in Jerusalem

  Theatrical Removals

  Nightwork

  It Is After All Winter

  Olive Oyl Drives Home

  PARALLEL RIVERS

  Buzzing in A

  Parallel Rivers

  Shoelaces

  Dickie Bomford’s Grasping Arms

  Grandad’s Shawl

  Keypunch

  Jane Hart’s Airband

  Frozen Carp

  Perfect Crimes

  That Time in Palm Springs

  For Phyllis Webb

  In memory of Constance Rooke

  THEATRICAL REMOVALS

  MERCENARY

  1

  After the war, Simon worked as a bricklayer.

  His best friend Robert poured cement while Simon set the bricks, skimming off excess mortar with a trowel. It rained or sleeted nearly every day that October, and Robert and Simon wore green rain gear as they rose higher and higher above the Winnipeg streets, dreaming aloud of getting rich and getting laid.

  One morning, as the men shared a cigarette before ascending the scaffold, a woman at the streetcar stop asked Robert for the time. Cold-fingered Bob did a soft-shoe shuffle. Next day she requested a cigarette from Simon.

  At noon the men conferred.

  “Promising episodes, these,” said Robert, offering half his sandwich.

  “What’s this for?”

  “By way of leaving the arena to you, Si,” said Robert. “What I mean is, I’m approaching an understanding with the woman in the penthouse yonder — name of Agnes — about the ownership of the gold wristwatch.”

  “What wristwatch?” Simon wiped his lips, tasting brick dust.

  “Don’t be slow,” said Robert. “I say this much: the semaphore is redundant. As of last night. Tête-a-tête. Okay?”

  Simon felt a twinge — jealousy? Envy? He’d noticed Bob’s demented flapping, come to think of it always in the direction of the penthouse yonder, but had said nothing.

  “Suppose a person was to get married,” said Robert. “Eh, partner?”

  A freezing wind blew the clouds away, and Winnipeg sparkled like a plate of oiled nuts and bolts on a great cloth of faded yellow.

  “We all come to it in the end, Bob,” Simon said at last.

  Can it all have happened so quickly? In one evening? Or has he been duped, has Robert withheld information, has Robert been meeting this woman, plotting with her for weeks in some soft down nest in the penthouse? What of his and Robert’s fond dream of bedding a woman for every brick laid? Ah, betrayal!

  Robert was still blabbing: “It’s not just the money, either. Don’t think that. She’s something special is Agnes. Last night . . . boyoboy! She’s a peach. She’s smart.”

  “It’s just a matter of time, I guess,” Simon mumbled. “You’ll be getting out of the weather, you’ll be quitting on me.”

  “Listen, Si. I’ll finish this job, that’s sure. What, are we not buddies? Look, the sun’s out, sky’s blue, bricks are waiting — let’s fly!”

  A week later, Hilda, the woman at the streetcar stop, asked Simon if he’d like to go for a drink. He squinted through the rain as he tried to strike a match. The cigarette between her lips was crooked. A drip formed at the end of her nose, trembled, then fell onto the wrinkled paper, soaked the middle section of the cigarette as she waited for him, stock-still, pouting, dripping. He grinned into his cupped hands, produced the flame; it died. He yelped at his scorched fingers.

  “Forget it,” she said, but nicely. “Here’s the trolley. Tonight?”

  “Yeah. Well. See you tonight, then.”

  Way above the street, Robert shouted “Pack Up Your Troubles” as Simon climbed toward him. Red-faced, his cap pulp, he thumped Simon’s shoulder. Simon gasped, a second of panic, swayed on a girder, the streaming world like a seamed catcher’s mitt tilting to cover him.

  “Crazy bastard!” he shouted, as his friend yanked him in by the hump of his sodden jacket.

  “Smile boy smile!” said Robert. “She’s no looker.”

  “Yeah,” said Simon, breathing hard. “But she knows it, too. She’s not stuck up. No gold watch from the penthouse.”

  “Easy fella. Don’t get your shirt in a knot. Didn’t mean it. She’s not that bad.”

  At the beer parlour, Simon showed Hilda a trick. “Give me your glass, Hilda.”

  “But it’s empty.”

  “Much easier to fill when they’re empty, glasses. Watch this.”

  Very carefully, he breathed from his gaping mouth onto the glass, gradually revolving the base with his fingertips. Balancing the glass on his open palm, he closed his other hand round its circumference, gripping tightly. Releasing, he passed the tumbler to Hilda. “What d’you see?”

  “It’s still empty.”

  “And?”

  “And warm.”

  “But what d’you see?”

  “Smudges.”

  “Any fingerprints?”

  “No. Just smudges.”

  “Now. Look at my fingers, Hilda, the pads.”

  Quite often after work Hilda and Simon went dancing, or to a show. She worshipped big band. He tried to sing like Der Bingle, “They used to tell me I was building a dream.” He performed for her a good imitation of Lugosi’s Dracula, and she taught him to jive, and they jived like there was no tomorrow. By April they were in love, got hitched in June. Bought a house in the new development on the outskirts of the city.

  Hilda, with no difficulty at all, chose pink gorilla wallpaper for the second bedroom; the wallpaper salesman said he was impressed by her decisiveness.

  That evening after supper Simon
was blithe, strolling through the living room, destined for his usual chair, when Hilda touched his waist.

  The couple arrested between the coffee table and the sofa.

  My life! thought Simon. Wait for it!

  “Let me see your fingers, Count Dracula,” Hilda whispered. “Let’s see ‘em! Put them here. Gently!”

  2

  Over the years Simon and Robert met less and less frequently, usually in bars. The sessions characterized by stilted reminiscences, slurred insults, sudden slaps on the back. Several New Year’s Eve attempts to unite couple to couple ended in a wrong arrangement of the stars. The women simply were not easy together; the tight-lipped men drank and drank. What Agnes and Bob had, Hilda and Simon had not.

  “Aw, sugarplum!” Simon would say. “Aw, pumpkin!”

  “No good,” Hilda would reply. “Simon, you’ll never amount to a darn thing.”

  3

  Simon, laid off from his construction job, his relations with Hilda strained of late (she was pregnant), passed a winter’s evening with Robert. Of inspiring confabulation. Love and pity.

  Five drinks apiece into the night, in duet sometimes, sometimes one at a time, each hearing the other’s voice, not the words but the tones — warm, friendly, gruff with tobacco and whiskey. Not listening, but filled with longing.

  “Wish it would’ve lasted.”

  “What?”

  “Dunno. The barracks, jalopies, dancehalls, England, in the mood, the whole country in love.”

  “I did it in the army truck in training, once in the river.”

  “I did it in a long letter home.”

  “Oh Lord! I did it in the rubble. In the hospital. Once in a nightmare in France under the flack.”

  “Ah. Women. In the long grass, in the blossoms, in the village, in the Palais, in the lanes, in Ma’s front room.”

  “And then it was bricks in the rain, us in the air singing of freedom and hope in all that wind.”

  “Ah. Yes. We were in the world, were we not?”

  “We were. Best friends building the good old days!”

  “Call me, okay?”

  “You call me, hey!”

  “Okay, I’ll call you.”

  “Hey, I’ll call you!”

  Simon staggered home through bleak streets feeling light-headed. How long past midnight and how bitterly cold. He stopped to greet a streetlamp; the lamp blinked off. He circled the block, paused again at the dark corner; the lamp blazed forth. In a stupendous absence of will he tumbled to his knees at the roadside. Time to pull the pin, Simon, man. But what about his son, his unborn son?

  Now here was a vision.

  The lad’s face wrinkled into a smile as he squatted on the frosty sidewalk.

  The wind sighed less harshly.

  “‘Tis cold,” said the boy.

  “It is,” Simon replied, his throat constricting.

  “Here long?”

  “Oh,” he croaked. “Short time.”

  “You were waiting for me, surely.”

  “Surely, I was!” Simon blanched at the proud tone, but noted his son’s Irish accent with some pleasure.

  “Where’s our Mum?” said the boy. This time it was pure Lancashire.

  “I don’t know.” Simon began to feel better. “Can you do Canadian?”

  “I know a song. Want to hear it?”

  “But where’ve you been all this time? Years we’ve been waiting!”

  “Stay here, Dad. Stay here. Listen.”

  The moon shone on his son’s bald head; behind him, like a gravestone, rose a factory chimney. And, in the sudden delirium of windchimes, the lamp expired, and Simon dragged his body from the frozen ground and went in search of a taxi to drive him home.

  4

  “You’re a fool, Simon, that’s all,” Hilda would say. “Everyone knows you’re just a two-bit clown. Everyone.”

  “Garn!” Simon would reply. “You women! Garn!”

  He answered an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Entered into a complex correspondence with a group called Diplomacy Plus. Veiled questions, veiled answers. One summer day he received a phone call from a representative.

  “If accepted, you may have to leave the country within a month.” The nasal voice invited him to a meeting, would not say more.

  El Salvador, thought Simon, hanging up. Bogata. Kampala. Beirut. Berlin. Dublin.

  “Simon, you’re a dreamer,” said Hilda. “When are you going to grow up?”

  Two days later the one-way ticket to Calgary arrived.

  On the eve of his interview, they went to Bob and Agnes’. Simon got drunk. Hilda anxiously watched his Bing Crosby impersonation.

  “And so I followed the mob.”

  “The cracked bells of St Mary’s for an encore, I suppose?” said Robert. “So you’re going to be a mercenary?”

  “Sooner or later,” said Simon, “a guy must do something . . . ”

  He was trying to stop staring at Agnes. She looked as cool, as rich, as Ingrid Bergman. Sitting beside her, Hilda with her huge belly seemed pathetic. But at least the wives were getting along. He sidled to the window overlooking the city.

  “Life at the top, Bob. It’s a long way from balancing on girders in the snow.”

  “Question of perspective, partner. How will it feel to be a daddy at last? You’ve wanted it a long time. And tell me. Why leave now, now the little family’s complete?”

  The men embraced. Behind them, Agnes was laying her hand on Hilda’s stomach.

  “No, not there, higher. Now push. A bit harder. Feel?”

  “It kicked back! I felt it! Robert, come here. You can play tag with the baby! D’you think it can hear us?”

  “He is a little boy,” said Hilda. “Right, Si?”

  When the plane touched down in Calgary, Simon took a cab to the Hotel Elan, checked in, then got back in the taxi. “The Convention Centre,” he told the driver.

  On entering the third-floor office, he was handed a drink by a secretary behind a concrete post. She wore dark glasses and a white V-necked sweater; the desk concealed her legs. She gave him a booklet entitled Guerrilla, and a form headed Catalogue of Applicant’s Shortcomings. “Fill this out and bring it back.”

  He finished his drink, a kind of weak champagne, completed the form, then slid the pages back across the desk.

  “Remove your hat,” the secretary said. “Step on the footprints and watch the birdie.”

  The camera swivelled into position. She aimed the lens at him.

  “Give me your hand . . . What’s this?”

  “I’ve been a bricklayer for years. They rub off. Other hand’s the same.”

  She closed the inkpad. “Could be a point in your favour. Fillings?”

  “In my teeth? A few.”

  “Your interest in my cleavage has been noted. If you’re found suitable, instructions will be forwarded.”

  When she led him to the conference room, Simon watched an inch of skin between the sweater and the beige skirt. The sweater was certainly too small. She introduced him to the interviewer before returning to her post.

  “Special demolition,” the interviewer read from his application, weighing the words.

  Another woman.

  And the voice on the phone, female too.

  In the conference room, he stopped feeling self-conscious and started to feel hungry. The interviewer, a tall redhead with tiny breasts, was in sandals and her toes were all the same size. She wore a sweatshirt and pedal pushers. Her legs were unshaven. On her cheek two lightning bolts crossed, one red, one blue. Hilda would never believe this. The questions were casual. Simon detailed his military experience. The interviewer said, “Monogamy could hinder your appointment.”

  “Oh?”

  “Why d’you seek this type of work?”

  “It’s all I know, all I’m really good at — I am married.”

  The woman shrugged. “You should dress more casual. Try a Hawaiian shirt, summer trousers.”
/>   So warm in the big room. The lights hurt his eyes. Simon imagined the presence of a third woman, more attractive than the secretary, even than the interviewer. This woman — actually a girl — would be naked; she’d bear the name of an exotic city, show him where to set the charges. She reminded him of Agnes. She seemed distant, apocryphal. He felt puzzled, aroused. Anyway, he thought, a perfect opposite to Hilda.

  “I think marriage is a safe cover,” he added. “My wife’s flying in tonight to join me. I promised her some sightseeing tomorrow. She —”

  The interviewer crouched and took a plate of hors d’oeuvres from a small fridge. She rose and popped a stuffed olive between his lips. “Our objective is the insidious global patriarchy. Say the first thing that comes into your mind. Fingerprints.”

  “Automobile,” he replied, trying to swallow.

  “Automobile.”

  “Jealous,” he replied, his eyes prickling.

  “Jealous.”

  “Skin,” he replied, abashed, respectful.

  “That’s all,” she said, and they shook hands.

  Back in his room at the Hotel Elan, Simon dialed the airport to book his and Hilda’s return flight for the next day. The air conditioning was on the fritz. He was waiting for the reservation clerk, tapping his foot to the airline muzak “What Are You Doing the Rest of your Life?” when Hilda pushed the door open.

  “Hello. I — ”

  Simon raised his hand. “Yes. Mr and Mrs. That’s correct. Tomorrow at two? And what was the flight number?”

  “Look!” said Hilda.

  “Raisin pie! God bless you, Mrs Willman! D’you feel okay, honey?”

  “Too hot. How’d it go? We’re not going home so soon? I just arrived. You’re not about to leave me for some foreign war?”

  “Not certain yet. Have to wait and see.”

  “So tell me. Don’t you look like the cat that swallowed the mouse?”

  “It’s a queer organization. Italian, I think. Jeez, you’re big! Here, sit down with your pie. Don’t worry, I asked for short-term jobs.”

  Later, in front of the TV, Hilda made love to Simon. They left their clothes off to keep cool, and he sat on the straight-backed chair while she knelt between his legs.