Down in the Ground, page 7
My wife reached an arm across to stop me from climbing out, saying: “Don’t get out.” But I saw the shadow, and I wasn’t going to sit there watching our neighbour get ripped off. No way. I was up for the dangerous thing. Like photographing coyotes on a hunting mission or getting a close-up shot of a bird that could rip a vein from my neck. I got out of the car.
Then the shadow thing stood up. It was a teenager, maybe seventeen or eighteen—a boy, he could have been younger—it was hard to tell. He wasn’t very strong looking. His hunch told me he was cold and hungry, but I was probably reading an element of helplessness into him. Helpless things are more dangerous. He had a jiggle bar in his left hand for opening car windows and in the other he held a knife. It wasn’t a switch-blade. I would have understood a switchblade. I would have thought: “Oh, he must be a tough from the local high school or part of a gang like Marlon Brando in The Wild Bunch.” But no. The closest his knife came to being in a bunch of anything was likely a bunch of grapes or bananas. He disappointed me. It was a paring knife. The kind of knife I use on Sunday mornings for cutting my wife’s grapefruit into slices. I should have been more frightened by it, but it wasn’t frightening. It was for fruit.
He was wearing dark sneakers, black gym pants like the kind boxers train in to look tough. Rocky has on a pair when he runs up the steps of the art gallery in Philadelphia. And the shadow had on a black hoodie with the cowl up. Maybe he thought it was a kind of disguise, a half-hearted attempt to be a jiggle bar ninja in a laneway on the edge of a ravine, but the costume didn’t work. He could have dressed as Batman and that might have been more dangerous. Superheroes are lunatics. But he had on white socks. Gym socks. The kind a person buys in a discount store, three pairs for a dollar. Guaranteed to last two squash games or maybe a week on a walking treadmill. Exercise socks. He tossed aside the jiggle bar and it jangled on the laneway’s gravel.
He started walking toward me with the knife held out full length, like he had been told to be careful with it in case he fell on it. For a moment, I froze. I didn’t know what to do. The kid had pimples. I thought: “I’m going to be killed by an acne case.” Then I thought: “Yeah, guy, I can take you.” I reached down and picked up a handful of gravel, grey stones about the size of robin’s eggs, then stepped into the beams of our headlights.
He could have run. He should have run, but he didn’t. No. The guy stepped into the lights, turned his face toward my wife in the glare so she got a good look at him, and he raised his hands over his brow and squinted at her.
That’s when I thought about the coyotes. Hunting. Afraid. Struggling to survive. Maybe the kid was dying and he needed to rip off my neighbours. I thought: “Is there anything in my garage he would steal?” I pictured him slinking through the dark, pushing my lawnmower ahead of him, or maybe walking off with the spade over his shoulder, a shovel I had to use each spring for doing yard work. Or maybe my rake. I hate raking. I don’t own any trees. The leaves belong to other people and I spend my time cleaning them up. My time.
Then my wife leaned on the horn. She blasted it hard. A long sound. A drone, baritone note like a train approaching a level crossing and seeing a van of nuns ahead, waving their arms in distress, pleading for the juggernaut to stop before it hits their charitable vehicle. Or at least it sounded like that in the darkness.
The kid dropped his knife, his bag, and ran into the ravine. I could hear him slipping and cursing as he hit things on the way down the embankment. I felt sorry for him. He was in a lot of danger. He could be breaking his leg. Then the crashing stopped.
As he disappeared, I heard a sound like two dogs howling at the moon, only much lonelier. And when my wife had shone the headlights in his eyes, they lit-up like two huge, lonely moons before the Earth moves its shadow between the lunar surface and the sun, glowing brightly, and then gradually going dark.
Snow Pudding
GEE WAS FROM up north and never understood directions in Toronto. Her extended family, most of whom had spent their entire lives in the city and would not leave it even in when their bodies had to be buried in the country plot they were entitled to, spoke the language of Toronto direction fluently.
They lived “up in the north end.” The Viaduct was “over the Don,” but the Danforth, not Danforth Road or Avenue, but just “the Danforth,” was out east.” So was Nova Scotia which was farther away than anyone could imagine from The Dan-forth, but if you went to Montreal on the train you were “down in Montreal.” During the previous war, the boys had been “over in France,” which in a manner-of-speaking was not far from the Beaches where one went “down” in order to have a picnic. But this war was different. The boys were “off in Hong Kong.”
Gee said as she laid her knife and fork side by side on the empty plate of her Christmas dinner that “off” just wasn’t right. “It is as if you are treating them like a lamp. On one minute, off the next. It doesn’t bode well.”
Martha, her sister-in-law, set aside the tomato jelly after helping herself and said: “It’s a good thing they are ‘off’ in Hong Kong. The Japs aren’t going near the place. They’re too tied up in China, and now they’ve taken on everyone else in the Pacific. Hong Kong is a safe place for your Charlie.”
Martha had decided to remember the boys, especially Charlie and his second cousin Don, by making their favourite desert. When the dishes were cleared away and the house was silent after the business of Christmas day, she would write and tell them both that they were in her thoughts and prayers, and spiritually evident in her snow pudding. She had saved her ration coupons and had been lucky enough to find five lemons. Mr. Taggert in the store said they were a head-scratcher when they arrived, by magic, from down in Florida. The Americans weren’t sharing their fruit with anyone, except possibly Mr. Taggert.
The lights flickered as a sign that it was time to pull the blackout blinds. Annie, Martha’s daughter, went around to each window and made sure that no cracks of light were seeping through or they’d get a fine.
“I’ve been doing civic defence at school,” Annie said proudly.
Her father said: “You were on the roof of the bloody school doing plane spotting. I walked in and said to the principal: ‘Look here, no daughter of mine is going to stand on your roof during an air raid. She’s going to be safe at home in the coal cellar with me and her mother.’”
“He wants to go down to the coal cellar,” Martha said to Gee. “We’d be black as night down there. We’d ruin our clothes, and washing supplies are getting so expensive these days. I think the army is rolling in too much mud, if you ask me.”
Martha’s husband stood up and went to the sideboard.
Just before he turned on the radio he asked if there was any more snow pudding.
“That last batch melted on my tongue. I don’t know how you got the lemons, but it was perfect. I could just picture Lake Simcoe last summer, all of us eating out under the trees before we sent the boys off.”
The radio, hushed at first, grew louder as it came to life. Martha’s husband put his hand on the top to make sure it was warming up.
A voice emerged from the silence. “Here is the CBC News. Following a surprise attack on this holiday morning, the garrison at Hong Kong has fallen. Under a heavy Japanese invasion by land, sea, and air, the Empire forces defending the Chinese city, composed largely of Canadian troops, suffered heavy casualties before surrendering at 2 p.m. Ottawa time. In other news, Prime Minister King—”
Gee gasped. Martha raised her napkin to her eyes and began to weep into it.
“My poor boy,” her husband said, “my poor, poor, boy.”
“They might have gotten away. They might be safe,” Gee said, though her voice was choked with tears.
But off was too far away to imagine. Annie, with tears in her eyes, tried to picture her brother. She stood at the drapes, her head bent and pressed against the window frame beneath them. She wanted to throw the curtains open, but instead peered into the backyard through a narrow slit. At first, she saw the reflection of her own eye, staring from the glass, trying to make out anything that might be alive and moving in the snow, but there was nothing there, and it would take a long time to melt.
Leash
SOME DOGS LOOK as if they don’t know anything, but not a collie. Collies are always supposed to come to someone’s rescue. A collie runs somewhere, and everyone knows that dog is on top of things, saving the life of someone who has fallen down a well. They are a credit to dogdom. Firemen in the city used to use collies to rescue people from burning buildings, but someone made them stop because collies are long-haired, catch fire more easily than short-haired dogs, and look terrible singed.
Allison didn’t want to put out fires, but she wanted a collie. Her mother said their house was too small. It was. The house had two bedrooms, and because it had been built before the Second World War in what had been a working-class area of the city, the closets were shallow, just deep enough for three shirts—one to wear on Sundays or to be buried in, and the other two rotated in and out of service on work days until the cuffs and collars frayed. Her mother told Allison that the elderly couple who had owned the house before them had left a box of shirts in the basement, all with worn collars. Allison could have the pick of the litter for a painting smock or to play doctor in with the sleeves rolled up.
Collies and collars were the subjects Allison remembered from her childhood. She imagined the perfect collie—long-haired, white, and black, and golden-brown—dressed up by her in a shirt with a frayed collar until the neighbour who owned Rexy told her to stop, saying dogs weren’t meant to be dressed and it was insulting to them.
When Allison fell in love with Thomas, whose beard was long and golden brown, she would reach up and button the top of his shirt and he would ask her why. Allison didn’t know. It was just something she loved to do.
Thomas was her pet.
Together they went for long walks along the river flats and back up River Street and through Little Chinatown if the weather was good. She would glance sideways at lamp posts and fire hydrants and hope they would have meaning for him, but they didn’t. She told Thomas how much she had wanted a dog when she was a child, but her mother always pointed out their small house was no place for a dog because the closets were way too tiny.
On one of their walks, Thomas sat Allison down on a park bench in Withrow Park, and they watched the dogs running back and forth with their owners because the park was an off-leash area and the dogs had to learn to be friends. That’s when he told her the truth about himself in his own way. He liked the dogs that lifted their legs on trees and fire-hydrants rather than the ones that had to squat.
“He probably just wanted his freedom,” her mother said. “Men don’t like to be on a leash, no matter how long you let it out.”
Feeling as if no one would rescue her, Allison was inconsolable with her mother. The closets, she said, were not big enough for anyone to go into let alone come out of. She went to her room and wept as she held a dog collar. It was black, and silver and the name plate was inscribed “Thomas.”
Top Six
KAPLASKY USED TO stand in the dressing room before games and wave a jock strap and cup in the air and declare he was like Napoleon and was going to suit up like us. He said he’d know how we felt on the ice. One day, he didn’t just hold up the cup: He dropped his pants and put it on, adjusting it and smiling. It was embarrassing seeing the coach’s junk like that.
“Every game, men,” he shouted at us as if he was a preacher full of the fury of the Almighty, “every game I will wear this, so I can get inside your heads and know how your brains work or not.”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t let my little brain do my thinking for me on or off the ice, but he would have benched me. I was getting little ice time as it was, and I was the top scorer on the team.
We were the Roxboro Rovers. I don’t know who the hell designed our logo. Some of the teams in our Junior B league had polar bears or vipers on their crests, and those were cool in a cartoon kind of way. Ours was a white rose. I mean, who the hell puts a rose on the front of a maroon jersey? On the white away jerseys you couldn’t see the damned flower, and the other teams always told us we played like someone sprayed perfume on us.
We were never a good team.
We always sat at the bottom of the league, and I suspect that’s why no one noticed Kaplasky for the seven years he ran our town’s team. He’d pick his favourites. His favourites weren’t the best players. At first, I didn’t know why he chose the boys he did. Then I saw them either go into his office or come out. One day one of them was crying, a winger who should have been a fourth liner. The winger wouldn’t say what had happened in the office and shoved me away.
We weren’t a big town either. Roxboro was the kind of place you drive past because it’s off the main highway six miles, and after the railway closed the line we weren’t near anything except the town’s rose garden where there used to be a bank.
It was my Mom who started the whole anti-Kaplasky thing.
I have a hockey mom. I love her dearly. She’s the type of mom who drove me to practices at four a.m. through blizzards and sat in the stands with a stop watch. She calculated everyone’s ice time. She showed us our Corsi ratings, time of possession, number of shots—the kind of stuff you’d expect from a major league statistics guru. No one asked her to do it. She just did it. She wanted me to get drafted, though she told me I’d be a late-rounder as long as Kaplasky was in charge.
Things fell apart for Kaplasky the day we lost thirteen to six. I had the six. Our goalies had the flu. Kap stood at the entrance to the shower room and kept grabbing his nuts, shaking them, and watching us. When you’re showering with a bunch of guys, your teammates and your friends, guys you go to high school with, the kind of mates you stick up for in school, you don’t stare at their junk. Really, there’s no place one ought to look. So, I looked at Kaplasky.
He was holding a long-stem white rose, sniffing it, shaking his cup—at the time I thought he had a cup on—and yelling at us, telling us we were thorns. Then he threw the rose down on the tile floor of the shower and told us none of us were men enough to pick it up from the suds. So, Gary, the winger who’d come crying out of Kap’s office, bent down and got it, his ass facing Kaplasky, when the oddest look came over the coach’s face and he turned and disappeared into his office. Gary wrapped the towel around his waist and followed Kap behind the closed door.
I wrapped a towel around my own waist, my hair dripping on my shoulders, and followed him in my thongs. I wanted to see what was happening in there. Usually, if a coach is going to yell at you, you’re allowed to get dried and dressed first. When I opened the door to his office, Kap had his trousers down and he was cleaning himself up.
I said: “Hey, how come I score six goals and I don’t get more than ten minutes in a game? Do you even know what kind of Corsi that says about me?”
“Close the door,” he said. “You can be top six if you want.” And just as he was about to zip up his pants, he stopped, dropping them. I turned and left, but as I stepped out of his office, I pushed a chair against his door. My Dad was standing outside the entrance to the change room as one of our goalies slammed the locker room door open, and everyone in the hallway outside could see Kaplasky with his junk hanging out, Gary crying in a heap on the floor, his towel to one side, and that’s when the investigation started.
So, by the next weekend, there was a guy from the league standing in our dressing room, a bunch of lawyers, the top six guys having been questioned, and the rest of us sitting in the dressing room wondering whether we should suit up or not. The Vipers were already skating their warm-up.
The guy from the league shouted: “Listen up! Guys, you’re forfeiting today’s game.”
Someone yelled “Shit!” because we still had a chance, remote as it was, to make the playoffs if we didn’t lose any more games.
“The team is being disbanded. It’s in debt and you no longer have a coach.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked.
“We’ll have a dispersement draft and you’ll have to go where we send you.” That meant that if we wanted to continue playing hockey we’d have to move away from home. I was prepared to do that. I got picked by the Vipers. I was their top scorer in the playoffs and got noticed enough to get chosen by a Junior A team, and eventually I went in the third round of the big draft. I did a couple of years in the ECHL, then I thought, what’s the point? The guys there, at that level, staring up at the big leagues like fish with lights on their heads at the bottom of a sea trench—I’d have to get past them if I ever wanted to be a success.
Our top six didn’t get chosen in the dispersal draft. Those six, all of them ... I’d like to say I knew what became of them, but hell, who knows. No one in Roxboro ever mentions the team. They tore down the arena to put it all behind them. The rose garden was dug up for a parking lot.
When I was skating for one of those southern ECHL teams, a franchise in the middle of Alabama with a mildly inappropriate logo that recalled the days of the Confederacy —the Rebels—I was certain I saw Gary. I was boarding the Stars and Bars bus for a long ride to Florida. Gary was sitting slumped on the sidewalk outside a greasy spoon that had closed for the night. His left sleeve was rolled up past his elbow and his right hand was open with a syringe in the palm. And in his other hand, he held a limp white rose.
What Kasha Said
I LIKED KASHA. She had brown eyes that said much more than any words she ever used. Her eyes could comment on things that could not be said in awkward circumstances. I became intrigued by her eyes during a Medieval History tutorial, and she saw me looking at her. That’s how we met. I had assumed she was English, possibly Welsh because of her dark hair. Her accent was British but that was only because she had spent the early part of her teens in Guildford before her family moved on, but though it was brief it was enough to make her sound British to those she knew.
