Parallel Rivers Page 6

  IT IS AFTER ALL WINTER

  THOUGH NOT IN THE GREAT RIFT Valley where the dry season has parched the earth May to October, and now green grass returns all the cattle in the world to us.

  A boy and his sister ride a puff-a-train to the next village where the old man breeds tropical fish in rows of tanks in his garage. He nets two red-tailed black sharks and spirits them through the misty humming aisle. The children buy two jam donuts from the cake shop by the station and eat them on the train home. The boy licks his thumbs, hugs close the plastic bag wrapped warm in layers of newsprint. Steam rolls under bridges, along embankments. He wants to be a soldier, but doesn’t want to join anything. He’s in love with putting fists in the air, seeing his own fists in their own orbits.

  He is thirteen when his first girlfriend gives him three slim paperbound books on tropical fish, a going-away present. Each sequence of photographs — translucent boxes, a cartoon strip — contains miracles of a lost country. Now the boy will become a warrior.

  He sharpens and sheathes the knife to be used in the ceremony. At dawn on the specified day he sits, legs splayed, at the entrance to the kraal, facing the pasture lands. His uncle will step forward to support his back and receive a goat for his service. If he screams they will say he has kicked the knife and the tribe members will spit on him.

  His wife gives him a roadmap of England for his thirtieth birthday, and together they trace his prospective journey home. You can’t go to England without me, she says. Something will happen.

  But he goes, alone, and falls in love, though is glad to return.

  The laundromat stands east of the barbershop and the Burnside Book Bin. He fits several quarters into the spin dryer, then leaves the bright room. Twenty-eight minutes. On his way by, he checks the time on the barber’s clock. A rainy wind attacks his neck and a dull bell chimes as he pushes open the Book Bin door.

  He goes to the Abrams hardcover on its high shelf in the dark reaches of the shop, opens at random and reads: “Physically they are among the handsomest of mankind, with slender bones, narrow hips and shoulders and most beautifully rounded muscles and limbs.” Here — after the books and the map — is the angle of a red beadwork headpiece across a temple’s indentation. The shape of a shaved black skull. And he’s in shock again at the wild whole world. Flies buzz in the dusty shop and through the thin wall between the Book Bin and the barbershop the barber’s muffled voice berates a customer. The ochre-painted bodies take themselves away, too dignified, far-flung. The twenty-eight minutes are passing.

  He thinks he will probably kick the knife. He’s misplaced his sister, forgotten his first girlfriend. He will leave his wife. He won’t go to Kilimanjaro. He knows. Neon tetras dart around the bigger angel fish. Floaters. The angle of, the shape of. He’s killing time, waiting for the laundry to complete its cycle — but, ah! Red light streams from the open book in the dim aisle; the pasture lands flood pink; a warrior stands alone on one foot; the barber’s laugh cuts through the stale air.

  OLIVE OYL DRIVES HOME

  Salad Days

  AFTER HOSPITAL, BLUE RAGG COMES TO kill Popeye, comes twice to kill him. Both times they sit across the kitchen table, stiff and sober, toasting Blue’s dead brother with a formal drink.

  Take it easy, says Popeye. The way I figure it’s like this. You got your sports events, and you got your pornography. You got your real life and you’ve got your women. What I’m saying is you gotta know the difference. Know one thing from the other, see what I’m saying? There’s what happened and there’s the blame you want to pin on somebody. Listen, Blue, there’s the real and the uncertain.

  Yeah, Popeye, says Blue. Right. I’m hearing you. What the hell’s sports got to do with anything?

  Both times they part with a handshake, a real crusher, and Popeye’s fear, guilt, and nervousness deepen. He envisions himself a sailor again, the runt hero ever at war with his best friend. He dreams of rescuing someone: he plucks the two brothers from the suspended car and hurls them to safety just before impact. Every day he will set something right. Perform some good deed. Work hard. When news of Blue Ragg’s suicide reaches him, he panics, quits the area, moves to another plant in another city, but the line is run by kids and he can’t keep up. He learns the streets and lands a job in the transport division, delivering parts. Every day driving parts he tries to make friends, tries to discover someone out there he can talk to. He meets only kids, and not one will ask him for a drink, let alone invite him home. He stops dreaming of helping people, dreams instead of the mothers of these children, thinks about them, imagines them everywhere. But this city is inhabited by children, every day younger and younger. It’s a place of rinks and playgrounds, where TV stations transmit cartoons on giant screens. Toward dusk he may see the distant forms of men at crossroads, but he never sees the mothers, never sees women.

  Yet somewhere families are eating family dinners. Recording important games. Planning birthdays. Sealing cheques in envelopes.

  In the loading dock Popeye shuts his eyes, rubs his forehead along the smooth curve of the steering wheel. On the Saturday night that led to the accident, he and Blue climbed into the old white Olds, sat there a moment, waiting for Coy. The car chugged and somewhere in the dark there was music, a funny kind of music, kind of long-range missiles in the brain, heat-seeking.

  Working late, he drives needlessly past houses in residential districts, angling for a glimpse, but the light is wrong or curtains are drawn, the event he hopes to see already finished, or not yet begun.

  His brakes squeal and he scans the sidewalk. He guesses the children can’t see him. He adds years, gives them a future. He bestows a fuller cheek, softened skin, crow’s feet, fallen arches. He gets acquainted with the kids and numbers them; each acquires so many years. Girl children grow hips, boys bellies.

  Neighbourhoods change tone as these kids spontaneously age, waxing in a single moment from success to boredom to lethargy.

  When he steps from his car, though, his mathematical city collides with other versions, and in the chaos he is lost. He hurries home from work at sunup, jaywalking, his eyes weary from scanning, from fixing what won’t be fixed, roads blossoming to each side. Trucks effloresce, decay. The men on corners threaten his existence.

  After supper on his day off, he goes down and sits on a swing in the darkest part of the playground.

  Time for bed, he whispers to the kids.

  Unimpressed, they look out across the park, girls at boys, boys at girls.

  Skateboard: video: the outside world.

  He attempts subtraction. With some kids minus five puts them in the womb.

  He sits on the swing, calming himself, the dead end of the pendulum, till he’s alone, the city a ripple along the grass edge. He’s suspended above a veldt, too green, nodding asleep, another endangered species. He stretches once and is conveyed through a series of empty moments and the city gapes around him. Through an opening in the trashy wind, a 7-Eleven camera iris winks. After fluorescence comes the grey lobby of his building, his own finger poised above the elevator button, the tiny lens gazing from his door, the green digits of the clock radio. He slurps the Slurpee and brushes his hair. His mirrored face is ugly as sin and has nothing to say, and he’s orbiting his bed, mumbling his prayers. God bless the sailors lost at sea. The sound that wakes him at almost dawn is not the phone, not the soundtrack, not his own snores, but the outside going on in his absence. For light he swipes the remote from the carpet and aims. With the volume down, he watches creatures chasing the drawings they become.

  The saddest days have the worst nights. Every road is a solid steel tube, red or blue or orange, smooth and cool, stretching as far as the eye can see both directions. He’s part of the surface and it runs him through. Lunch at the luncheonette, he tosses salt over his shoulder. The child waitresses all have hiccups. Every pie in the mirror cupboard says a different time. Later and later and later. At home he has a migraine and can’t remember anything. When he t
ries the playground the grass looks lush and queasy. A breeze keeps him vaguely spinning like a pin on a thread. He’s locked down debating the gender of the earth, while headlights, radioactive, jive the park boundaries.

  He is sitting on his swing, hangdog, trying to come to a stop and watching light bounce off the tube, when a tall thin girl in green knee socks crosses in front. He closes his eyes.

  The accident happened slow/quick. Hot bright still Sunday afternoon. That Saturday evening, Popeye had steered the white car — slipping lanes, jumping lights — through that crazy music into careening traffic.

  Lemme puke, man, said Coy. Slow down the car. Yeah. It’s. Fuck. Ha!

  We should’ve left him, said Popeye. I said we should’ve left him.

  He’s all right, said Blue. Be okay now. Right bro? Holy God. Holy God.

  Lean out, for crying out loud! Shove his head out the Jesus window!

  Hey, Popeye, don’t push him. He’s fine, fine. Keep driving.

  Hey, assholes! said Coy. Gonna crawl up inside so deep, right up inside, huh? where it’s black and wet and HOTDOG, man, HOTDOG! Right, boys?

  Popeye can’t fatten the next flat scenes. Bar scene, street scene, bar scene. They motored all night — yelling, because noise fueled the illusion of really impressive speed — past trees, dark intersections, jumbles of buildings, from dance hall to dance hall. He just wants to swing free, stop thinking about it, wants there to have been successful communication, to finally understand what happened. They’d found a dawn party still howling. On the grass behind the carport the brothers squirmed one at a time with a half-mad teenage girl, while upstairs Popeye located a son’s room full of baseball gear. From the window, he watched the Ragg brothers. Then he watched satellites track the sky, till first light frisked the brushcut lawns and robins revved up, till his eyes grew heavy and he fell, struck from the vertical, to sleep on the cleanmade bed and dream of the assembly line, of an efficient woman worker in clean overalls.

  Then, later that Sunday, Popeye and the brothers regrouped to cruise in sunshine. Full steam ahead to next night. The car a shiny metal box, dusty upholstery, a dense smoke silence; outside in the afternoon, a lick of highway leaping. Road death, Popeye had one split second to think. Time shapes the vehicle, space fills it. Then some numbers got inside his head to project pedestrians standing round, and somebody saying, turn off the engine turn off the engine turn off the engine. Out he stepped and started to march, started to run, then the cop laid fingers on his shoulder. The emergency crew worked the jaws of life more than an hour to get Blue and Coy out — Coy already dead. Grandparents came from the home across the street and said nice things, shook their heads. Old folks being so friendly that he nearly cried remembering — it felt like remembering — some ache, some grief, a cry he had when crying was simple. The driver gets away, jaws of life, the driver always gets away, tries to run.

  Holy shit.

  Crumpled white Olds.

  Concussion changed the grandparents grey.

  I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!

  How many times has it happened? Every day the same, the same. Similar distance home from work and even the light from the sky seems green. Night cuts through the park and already the children are saying goodbye to one another. He follows the girl in green knee socks, puts his hand on her shoulder much as the cop did to him, desperation in the gesture, anger, desire. Puts arms about her — carefully, as if she might break — and she turns into a round woman, fat and warm as new bread, the softness of her pushing at his arms.

  Olive Oyl

  As though the sky has burst or his heart, he loves everything and has to sit on the ground he’s so happy. He leans back against her strong legs and looks up at her face and wants to cry. He reaches behind and grasps one of her big toes, holds it in his fist.

  That feels nice, she says.

  O yes, he says. O yes.

  Before Olive takes him home they go shopping for flowers at a corner store. The way she puzzles over selection astonishes him. Watching her broad shoulders, head inclined, blue eyes appraising foliage and colour, he’s shocked back to the middle of things, things separate and familiar, things on trial.

  Dear God.

  I feel strong, he tells her. Grab my shirt and we’ll take a spin over the metropolis.

  Me? she says. You must be joking.

  Okay, he says, I’ll grab you. You will be my dirigible.

  I don’t know what that is, she says. What is that?

  He holds her — he holds her all the way home, all night, whispers that he plans to hold her into next week, into the months ahead, as often as he can, if she’ll let him.

  She says that’s all right by her because one thing she is is nervous. Since coming to this city she fears being alone and available at night. Noises scare her. She says maybe soon she’ll be able to sleep without the gun under the bed.

  You got a gun under the bed?

  She shrugs. One thing she wants to make really clear, she doesn’t want him to pretend, she will know if he tries to match her skin with other skins he remembers or imagines. Her skin is soft and has little tucks and folds and she wants him to know it that way. It isn’t the skin of the little girl she once was.

  No way, says Popeye. I will never regret the transformation you have made —

  Because I fell for you, she says, is no reason for you to take me for granted.

  Right, he says. No, that is a gift.

  That first evening she catches him with: You got a puzzled expression. What is it?

  And strokes his brow.

  He answers, Nothing, sweetheart.

  He wants all children to rise up and witness his love.

  Crouched in the lee of her back before sleep, he prays, Please, Lord, make me whole and good.

  Next morning he hefts the rifle outside and empties it into the air. Crows squawk in a mad flap from line to glinting line in the brand new sun. He cleans and oils the gun, wraps it in a sheet, stores it on the linen closet’s highest shelf.

  He gives up his place by the park and moves downtown with Olive. Their love sends him to sleep dreaming of cherubim. She takes him to the zoo to visit her favourite penguins who are named Ruffles and Cleavage. Moths in the house terrify her; he catches a big silver-eyed specimen in cupped hands and throws it from the window to the early street; the flutterer spins into brief freedom before a baby robin makes the kill; Olive gasps at the quick papery crunch. She makes blueberry pancakes. He says he worships her with all his unshaven heart. She gives him a parrot. He takes her to the old park, asks her to sit on the swing, but she will not. He wants her to go inside a piano store, wants them to play “Chopsticks” at a glossy grand, he saw it in a movie once, but she won’t go. She buys him gold cuff links at a garage sale. They grope each other under newspapers during feeding time. Ruffles and Cleavage eat a lot of herring, some of it still frozen, Popeye is sad to note. He hangs his head and she tickles behind his ears. The parrot loves the cuff links. So many flowers it takes — the names of which he can never remember — to please her enough.

  From time to time he thinks he’s not enough and wants to be drinking with men, wants to be black and white, off the wall. He feels short of breath so he smokes a pipe and sits late in his recliner and dreams of his old fights. When Olive gets up middle of the night to pee, he is dozing, naked to the waist, the parrot asleep on his puny shoulder, its dirt swirls drying in the fur above his nipple. Startled, he yells: Go for it! He starts telling her about his salad days when everything was off the wall, how crazy and funny life was.

  What does that mean? Olive wants to know. Salad days. And off the wall like a picture, do you mean? Like someone took down a picture?

  No, he says.

  Give me a for instance, she says.

  She stands big and pink and naked in the middle of the room. And he remembers for her the time he worked up north on the islands with a chainsaw crew killing roadside alder so the trucks could get out with thei
r load of Douglas fir and how on the ferry they always said to the Indian deckhand: Haida! instead of Hi there! and how one day the foreman, a guy they called Brute, said okay you dumbnuts you got the ball I ain’t playing nursemaid no more. And how next morning everyone’s punchy, Popeye’s not even driven off the ferry when someone cracks a case, one of the guys bites a pillow in half, and Popeye’s thumping gas, howling down the road in the company pickup, feathers flying, can hardly see the gravel or the trees for goose down like snow falling real slow, and the foreman turns to him and blows smoke rings, old Brute’s dark as a bruise and choking and someone gives him a beer and he just croaks, I didn’t expect you guys to pass the ball back so fast.

  Olive says no thanks, she wouldn’t want to be anywhere near off the wall.

  I won’t even think about it, she says, going back to bed, it makes no sense.

  He calls the bird Jerusalem after a hymn.

  Olive enrolls in a night course in English.

  Dozy evenings on the chair, he drinks beer from the can. Waits for the headache. Arms wishing to enfold again the slender green girl. Hand crumpling the thin metal. Popeye tells his parrot that once upon a time Olive’s fat was all right. What he needed was fat to begin with and she kept him happy by putting on weight — he couldn’t get enough of her and the more he wanted the more was provided.

  He opens his mouth for the bird to pick his teeth.

  But now look! Popeye blows in the ruffled neck feathers. Some of that fat is a baby!

  Some is child and some honest flesh, but he can’t tell what from what.

  In his mind he shaves her, like carving a tree, strips her to a thin hard dowel that he then treats with water and heat to make supple. But the child resists: bump under the gloss, dark knot.

  He is not unhappy. He wants to attend prenatal classes, to be involved, directly involved in Olive’s processes. She is not interested.

  Let the baby alone, she says, let my body do what comes natural, she says. I’m taking a hold of my life.