Parallel Rivers Read online

  All afternoon I sat in the sun, eyes closed, my hair drying over the back of the cedar chair. When I stood, it warmed the length of my spine, slid like a soft friend about my shoulders, frivolous. When he came home from work, he brandished the scissors.

  “The barbarian cometh!” he boomed. “Where’s my pretty butterfly?”

  Close up he smells like garlic. Snip, snip.

  Afterward, he pats my cropped head. Says, “The human foetus has a kind of unpigmented fur until it’s about eight months old, then it sheds this and grows the soft baby hair that it’s born with. When the child loses this, he grows what’s called terminal hair — what we have.”

  “What I used to have.”

  We sip our drinks and watch the sun go down, watch the lank curve of hair in the grass lift in the fresh wind from the sea. The woman next door shouts across in her harsh accent: “They do that to me after the war. In France they cut your hair off and everyone knows what you do to live. They rape you, they cut your hair off and everybody knows. Welcome peace! Now we are free! Now you are pure! Ha! You only give yourself to live. I got long hair now. Let them come near it!”

  I feel sweat trickle from my armpit down my left side.

  The woman is fat and her hair hangs with less life than my hair on the lawn. She trembles. She’s standing at the fence that separates my house from hers. I’m looking at her, wide awake. My head feels light and my body naked beneath the shift. Her eyes are agonized as she stares at me, head on one side, hands clasped around a wood trowel handle. She will not move. My mind races as the sun sets. I’ll make fabric, I’ll spin my hair, I’ll splice a long rope. He has stood up; the screen door bangs and I’m left to continue a mad communication with this stout woman, to lose sight of her gradually, not through her withdrawal, but through the onset of night.

  DICKIE BOMFORD’S GRASPING ARMS

  One

  I’m going to have to try something desperate. Or let’s say creative, because I’m coming round to Sunny’s opinion, that creativity is the same thing as desperation. None of the shopkeepers, churches, sports clubs I’ve approached have been interested. So far all Dad’s got is four lines in the community news, and he’s been out there three months now. The breeze is colder this morning, smacks of winter. I wake up every day and wonder what it’s like to be bobbing on the harbour. What possesses him.

  Two weeks ago when I rowed his things out, he stood by the tent in the middle of his little boat, shirt flapping against his ribs, grinning and sneezing.

  “Never better,” he lied. “Never better.”

  He swilled his face and neck in water scooped from the chop, dripping all over his crusty trousers and telling me about the gulls he’d been feeding. “You bring fuel?”

  “Sure.” I looked round and felt seasick. The aluminum rowboat chirped alongside his wallowing clinker. He gulped a handful of water from the bucket, gargled, spat. I told him no one cared what he was doing. I told him for God’s sake to put on a sweater.

  “Won’t rain today,” he said. “Get my clothesline up this afternoon. Dry things out. You find work yet? You bring fuel?”

  “Dad. I’m saying that nobody gives a goddamn.”

  “Patience, Jasper. In a few months they’ll know I mean business out here. Not some flash in the pan.”

  “Why d’you need recognition? What are you trying to prove? You’ll catch pneumonia.”

  “Fit as a fiddle and ready for love. You, on the other hand, look terrible. You should stop moping around and find another job. You’re not sixty yet. When I was your age . . . I’ll need sugar next time and I’m short on rum. You should see the lights at night. When it gets dark the city’s like a cake and I’m the lucky birthday boy.”

  A wet wind stung my face. “Going to be one hell of a place come winter.”

  “Exposed maybe. Bit of a challenge. You know, I’ve been thinking. I’m glad they wouldn’t let me in the city harbour. This is better.”

  “Christ. A challenge.”

  “Best of both worlds when you consider.”

  “Both what worlds?”

  We got to work arranging supplies, and didn’t speak. I kept looking at him, trying to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look back, so I moved fast, upsetting his methodical pace, and it pleased me when he stumbled.

  “Got birds in the morning,” he said, catching his breath. “Seals and otters. Goddamn paradise.”

  “You look ill. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “ I’ve got time to think, Jasper. I’ve found the nerve to do some thinking. See how clear the water is?”

  I looked where he was pointing. It was green and deep and you could see way down to weed flashing like gasoline.

  “Get home now. Tide’s turned. See you next week.”

  “In two weeks.”

  “Right you are.”

  “We did say every two weeks.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  A blue heron plucked long legs from the shallows across the bay and whupped over our bow, croaking like death, into dirty sky on the other side.

  Sunny doesn’t question aloud Dad’s reasons for being out there, though I know she’s troubled. That’s her great gift, her silence around difficult stuff amid bursts of self-coaching chatter. I try not to wonder what the silence conceals. I used to believe she was as happy as an ostrich, but that was a long time ago when we were young. Well, younger. Then I discovered her one day, in her kitchen, wide-eyed and still, standing in the middle of a chaos of spilled drawers, leftover food, broken dishes. Even the dog was sitting motionless above the debris. People boggled her mind, she explained. She said she’d seen into the open destitution of people.

  Our eighty-three-year-old dad’s on a sixteen-foot boat anchored in the middle of the shallow part of a bay just off the gravel quarry, and I know Sunny’s worried. He’s going to stay there as long as he can. A good two years, his goal, a minimum of two years. It’s my job to ferry out food and water twice a month. Sunny’s the purchaser and packer; she remembers stuff I wouldn’t think of, like Q-tips, Preparation H, vapour rub, whatever. The images it all conjures. I was also supposed to pound the pavement to get him sponsors, and I really have tried to interest people in his cause, trying to extort faith and pledges to keep him afloat, keep his soul buoyant. But it’s a sad deal and I feel like a phony crusader. More and more now I let my fingers do the walking. It’s the same looking for work. The harder I try the falser I feel.

  I guess it’s not really his cause that’s stalled my life, I guess the desperation is all my own. Even so, he has turned away from us, from Sunny and me, and that hurts.

  So I waste the best two hours of the morning on the phone, drinking coffee and eating Sunny’s banana loaf and listening to good-natured boredom turn into cool disinterest, and fiscal suspicion into lumpen peevishness. Sunny breezes in to say look alive, to say a person must raise himself from his chair.

  “Find me a reason.”

  “A person must empty his head, Jasper, set his feet in motion and just go go go.”

  “Sunny, it takes a lot, getting out of a chair. A person must have a plan. A place to go, a thing to do. Work it out before using all that energy.”

  “A person might never get started. Look at you,” she says. “Stuck in the middle of your life.”

  “Know where you’re going before you set off, I say. Otherwise stand up and walk right into chaos.”

  “And where is Dad with all his careful plans if he’s not at the mercy of chaos? And what careful plan are you following, sitting there stuffing yourself?”

  No answer to that.

  Which sets me thinking. You can’t commit yourself to a cause just because you love someone, especially when you suspect his convictions are haywire and you’re not sure of the purity of your love.

  When Mother was alive she made for Dad these nice boxer shorts, Swiss cotton, pastel shades, some fifty pairs over the years. Things of beauty, with lovely seams. Dad gave me the survivors last
Christmas, all laundered and pressed, in a big red box. Said he could no longer bear anything under his trousers. Now, one of our differences is my father is left-handed — he dresses left — and I’m right-handed. Mum, scrupulous in every detail, tailored the shorts left. What I’m getting to is when I have to pee I can’t find myself. The opening’s not where it should be. I have to dance round in front of the urinal, fingers rooting in strong Swiss cotton, trying to delay the flow a few moments more. And while I’m dancing, it always comes to me that I’m looking for my father; I’m lost and small and looking for my father. I told Dad and Sunny this over Dad’s bon voyage dinner and Dad and I had a chuckle, but Sunny just sat there with a shrimp on her fork. Sometimes — times it doesn’t make me sad — sometimes I lie alone in bed and laugh myself silly thinking of boxer shorts. Sunny sleeps on a couch in the basement and I can be uninhibited in my room (used to be her spare bedroom) without her hearing. There must be a couple dozen of my mother’s coloured boxers, like new, filling a whole drawer of my chest. I’m fifty-eight years old and nothing is innocent. Maybe nothing has ever been innocent. Hen died last year and I lost my job and came to live with Sunny and between us we keep tabs on our father and talk about the family such as it was and the family dogs such as they were. Me and Hen and Sunny and Mum and Dad, and the Don and Adjutant. Every Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, and other long weekends whose excuses for being mean less than nothing, that’s all the people we were and all we needed. Sunny never married, never came close. Never got pregnant, I guess. Hen and I never had kids. Adjutant, who was the first dog, lived with Mum and Dad and me and Sunny till Sunny left home and took him with her. That was a long time ago and he lived a long life for a dog — seventeen years. That’s a lot of turkey leftovers. The Don — Hen’s and mine — came a couple of years later, and he outlived Mum, sticking around till he was almost twenty. After the Don we hadn’t the heart, Sunny nor me, for another dog, though we still enjoy talking about their different personalities. Old Adjutant and the old Don. I never met a dog who could hold a candle to our dogs. I’ve never come across a woman past forty with a natural sense of humour either. Hen always laughed at the most peculiar things. She laughed for months when her family, the whole kit and caboodle, moved to New Zealand the year we started having our sexual differences. I never fathomed what any of that was about. Sunny still laughs in public at the mall. Summer and winter, before her shifts at the old folks home, she sits on a bench under the palm trees in the middle of the shops and laughs. I know this because a couple of times I made the mistake of shopping with her and came home pretty disturbed. Mum, I remember, had a tee-hee-hee laugh late at night in bed. Yes, I’ve come to the conclusion that women once they stop looking young lose any natural sense of humour they ever had. Something else I firmly believe is that a person who’s known a person as long as I’ve known Sunny and my father can’t really see that person. It’s never the person you see, it’s something else, the patterns round them, kind of mean and narrow, mechanical, like a fridge instead of food, a car instead of going someplace. I used to work with a fellow who gave his wife a beating because the toilet wouldn’t shut off, because it just kept running and running and he came home this one time and caught her crying her eyes out, trying to fix it so it’d be fixed before he got home. Simple thing like that. And you can tell me that taking a hammer to the toilet would’ve made better sense and I’ll agree. Same senseless thing as when you live with a person all the years Mum lived with Dad and think you’re unhappy the way at the end Mum and Dad both thought they were and that each other was the cause. Reality is so different from what you think. With my dad it’s crazy because, though he won’t admit it, he is ten times more sad now my mother’s gone than when she was alive, sense of humour or no sense of humour. A wind has passed through him. He’s a bone rack.

  Take Sunny, now, my sister. She’s still got flesh, ideas of her own, and a way of picturing things, even though she’s bonkers in the mall, but I can’t see her. Nothing I try reaches even halfway — and if she’s trying to be seen it’s not evident.

  It’s almost noon and still cold in the room so I reach over and slide the thermostat up a notch. Sunny’s got her shoulder to me and is looking out the window. When she speaks again I know from the sound that her face is pinched and sour. And though we don’t entirely agree on Dad’s present occupation, I feel she’s on the money when she says that if Dad lived with us God would be in his Heaven. But then she goes on about how she thinks his desperation, creativity, whatever, is shut off. She thinks his bit of goodness is on the wane. His boat-sitting, she says, is pure meanness.

  I’m more impressed by the easy silence of Sunny’s big body than by any of these words creaking from her lips. I don’t care about the state his soul is in. I’m thinking that there’s more to soul than state. I’m hoping he’s on to something. Nor do I care about her opinion on the sorry condition of my soul, which she now proceeds to give. Till this morning she hasn’t said anything directly, not a word, though she’s implied a whole lot in these connections. Especially Sundays, fresh from church. The way she cooks or cleans or squints at the TV when I’m on the phone. Or the way she passes me items when we’re packing Dad’s things. Or the way she hurled ice cubes in the OJ last week when she caught me reading Playboy at her rosewood table. Till recently I’ve had the feeling that most everything I’ve done in my life has been okay by her. Not that I’ve given it a whole lot of thought, but I believed we’d be lost without each other. She’s sixty-two and people round here who don’t know mistake us for husband and wife. We’re both looking good, though my hair is grey and I’ve no prospects and Sunny’s slow to get going in the morning, and I reckoned we’d continue, I guess, for a while, to live together.

  I just don’t appreciate the hard words she’s sending me now. This funny thing has wedged itself between us and it’s shaping up ugly and I can’t figure out what to do. When Dad put his place on the market we assumed he was going to join us. Sunny vacated her bedroom and made it over, spare but cute, with a calendar of old locomotives on the wall. We figured we were his only option. And now we’re proved wrong. Sunny lies in her dungeon cot in the afternoon instead of going to the mall, and I stare at the Yellow Pages. This folly of his has crossed some boundary in our heads. Our routines are shot. Maybe she sees something I can’t, maybe women can see things — this weird fountain of verbal complaint, I can’t make sense of the words. Like a store of hurts coming unpacked and suddenly I’m in the wrong. I’m in the wrong in her eyes. I’m in the wrong and Dad’s in the wrong and she’s letting loose and that’s never happened before. Can’t she see how we’ve depended on her? I’m pretty sure that I’ve counted on her since we were kids, on that good image she had of me. The whole nine yards. Since I was a boy, since those days when I was trying to make a little world in a bucket out of sand and water and twigs and things from a cupboard in the kitchen, while Sunny looked on with admiration and worked alongside, digging in the dirt, planting her seeds and watering them, not even surprised when shoots came up in her patch and when I lost interest in one world after another. Jesus. So. I need to resurrect myself in Sunny’s opinion and that jumpstarts my sense of responsibility and that ignites guilt and fear and these take a roaring hold of my whole body and not knowing what to do keeps me down, keeps me strapped to this chair. Gut feeling is resurrection can’t be done. Damage is irreversible. Wrong or right doesn’t matter, why I’m in the wrong doesn’t matter. In her eyes I’m in the wrong and that’s the terrible thing. I always set the scene for her, looked out for her, made sure she wasn’t lonely, so she could give me her strength, silently let me know I might not be on the straight and narrow, but at least I was facing the right general direction. So it’s not Dad and his wacky harbour-sitting, I have this other puzzlement. I can’t figure out what to do now that Hen’s dead, now I’m living in my sister’s home and can’t move. I need to know how to resurrect myself in Sunny’s opinion.

  “You’re n
ot listening.” Sunny plunks herself down in her old chintz armchair. “We need to talk.” I put on a smile, but apparently we’re not to look at each other in this conversation. It’s a heavy one.

  “I know.”

  “He could die.”

  “It’s foolish, Sunny, what he’s doing. But if it’s what he wants.”

  “He could die.”

  “But — ”

  “A spiteful lonely death.”

  “We can’t board his boat and force him off.”

  “Well what do you propose?”

  “I don’t know. My throat kind of hurts. I just need rest. You know what I’d like? I’d like to feel alive, that’s all, I’d like to feel happy.”

  She looks thoughtful at this. I’ve got one elbow on the table and I’m cleaning dust grains out of the phone’s crevices with the silver end of my pencil. All of a sudden the planet seems a lonesome place full of someone else’s furniture. This is maybe the saddest I’ve ever been. I can’t leave Dad in the lurch. I despair of talking to Sunny, let alone shopkeepers and editors and business managers and personnel types. What else is there to do but tally the losses? My job, my Hen, Mum, forty-seven years of loving two dogs and now, last of all, Dad and Sunny, my place in Sunny’s good graces.

  “It’s funny,” I say, “isn’t it? To want to do something, but not know what?”

  “You’re right,” she says. “Of course you are. I’m just a big fat old nuisance.”

  “No, no.”

  Two tears roll down her cheeks.

  “Sunny?”

  “What?”

  “I think he’s sure of something.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You should see him. Come with me tomorrow. He talks about the sun coming up and the gulls. Don’t pass judgement.”

  Sunny shuts down the way a sulky flower misses water. She gets to her feet slowly, as if she has given up. Then she crashes about in the kitchen, packing his brown bag. She fills and seals Ziplocs and plunks them on the counter. I turn on the radio and wait for the marine weather. I check the tide book to figure out our best time to row across. How else should we spend our time when all maps to happiness have been replaced by maps to grief? Where else can we say we’re going with all the borders changing but to a family reunion? The little mound of oily dirt I’ve gouged from the phone lies at the centre of a coffee ring on the table. “He won’t wear Mum’s underwear,” I shout. “I hate this damn phone.” In the Yellow Pages I find nothing new. People occupying space. We’ll all be dead soon. We’ll all be replaced. I’m understanding nothing today.