Happiness of Fish (15 page)

Gerry has heard Vivian quote the same complaint from her mother in a home in Gander.

It's a big syndicate, he thinks. The Russian mob is muscling in on the laxative black market.

He buys the things on his list at the mall and walks back to the lodge. He knows that by the end of the week he won't be so quick to buy a whole list at once. He'll split it down into quick trips for one thing as the need to move gets stronger. Today is only the first day. When he gets back, they get through the afternoon by reading the newspaper together. The inside pages yield enough news of their old neighbourhood that he can read snippets and make small talk. He lasts until it's time for her to go down to supper at five o'clock. As he signs out at the desk and steps into the gathering evening, again he feels that
school's-out
thrill. He wants to yell and run with his arms swept back like jet wings.

In the name of getting it over with, Gerry visits Duane and Gretchen and the kids for supper. He follows directions Duane has given him and
drives south and west of the city. The city extends much farther than it used to and apparently plans to keep on going. Gerry arrives at a crossroad that used to be on the family's route to the cottage. It's a blank intersection in the middle of featureless fields, almost at the divide where farmland yields to cedar swamp. A harshly vertical brick church stands aloof, a quarter-mile back down the road. There are no signs of life around the church and virtually no traffic, but over the intersection a big modern stoplight hangs from a curved and polished aluminium pole. For now the light is talking to itself over an empty landscape, but if the city ever reaches this far, it's ready to take charge.

Duane and Gretchen's house is at the end of a road that straggles to a halt against the edge of some woods. It's a long, low house, somebody's country dream house from the '50s, built at the edge of the swamp. It probably seemed safe and far away from city taxes then. There is a much newer plastic-sided, two-storey shed behind with a rail-fenced paddock and a snow-covered manure pile. Gretchen's horse is tucked up for the winter. Beyond the horse shed is the winter ghost of a garden. Stakes and dry stalks push crookedly through the snow, giving the impression of an abandoned winter battlefield. A black metal satellite dish seems to have its muzzle in the air, baying silently at some electronic moon. There is a brass-plated fish symbol on the front door.

In Cod we trust, Gerry thinks as he rings the bell. He restoreth my sole.

Duane answers the door in jeans, a flannel shirt and work socks. Joshua and Natalie look around him from the hall.

“Gerry,” he says. “We're glad to see you. We surely are.”

The “surely” niggles Gerry. It has a soapy, southern, TV-preacherly feel to it. Duane is starting to talk like the representative of a congregation or a board of trade. It strikes Gerry as a new thing. He doesn't remember Duane sounding like this when they visited at Christmas just a couple of months back. He was earnest but not so pompous. He decides it's because Duane's in his own world here, home-field advantage. Gretchen just comes to the kitchen door and smiles shyly and waves.

Gerry had stopped in an upscale toy-store in a mall to buy presents for the kids. He's got a sort of loom for Natalie. It will make a strip of weaving that can be a belt or a narrow scarf. For Joshua he'd picked up a sort of beginner's palaeontologist kit. It had a pocket magnifier with
little folding legs. There was also a packet of “real fossils” to look at: some snail-like impressions and some things that looked like earwigs and carpenters in sandy-looking stone, shaved thin. There was a book that said how many millions of years old the fossilized bugs might be. That's where Gerry gets into trouble.

“Joshua,” Duane says. He never abbreviates. “You'd better give the book here, son. Dad wants to see what's in it before you read it.”

Shit! Gerry thinks. Joshua doesn't mind. The book was the least interesting part of the present. He's examining things through the double, plastic lenses.

“The carpet looks like trees from a plane.”

“I'm sorry, Gerry,” Duane says blandly. “You've got to understand where we're coming from here. When it comes to creation, we believe in the scriptures. I don't want to confuse Joshua.”

“You don't think a billion or two years of evolution is more impressive than a seven-day parlour trick?” Gerry asks. He hopes he's keeping it light, but doesn't feel like apologizing for the book. Duane purses his lips.

“The length of the days may have been much longer than what we understand now,” he says. “But even scientists are finding now that mankind is much older than they originally thought.”

Shorter and furrier too, Gerry thinks. Pictures of “Lucy,” the hominid fossil, come to mind. The serpent probably offered them a banana or some choice beetles and grubs.

“Daddy, how do you do this?” Natalie asks from the floor where she's trying to wrap yarn onto her loom.

“Supper's on,” Gretchen calls from the dining room.

The meal reminds Gerry of a spartan veggie restaurant he used to go to sometimes in his Weasel days in the '80s. Some woman he had met in a bar had suggested they go there. Gerry remembers thick soups of coarse root vegetables, not so much cooked as laundered. The way he recalls it, everything had tasted of parsnips, whether they were in the dish or not. The vegetables had all seemed old and woody. Gretchen's vegetable stew brings it all back. It's garden cuttings with a muddy background of lentils. Gerry likes lentils, but he likes them with Indian flavouring. Curry has apparently not made it into Gretchen's gospel cookbook.

“We're only eating one cooked meal a day now, “she says. “Everything else is raw.”

A scrap of a high school football chant floats across Gerry's mind. Rah, rah, eat 'em raw!

“Good for you,” Gerry says. He feels he'll owe himself another debauch at The Jade Gate for this. He thinks of a Garfield the Cat cartoon he saw once. Garfield is asked how he'd like a head of lettuce prepared. Deep fry that little sucker, Gerry remembers.

There is no coffee in the house and dessert is a bowl of raw fruit, so the meal seems unfinished. There is some sort of herbal tea that has a tang of catnip about it.

After supper Gerry plays the good and interested guest. He and Natalie manage to load her loom. He is taken out to the shed to meet the horse. It's a pony really, a stocky pinto gelding, getting fat on bought hay. It appears to be exempt from the family's dietary laws. No one says anything when he brings out the cube sugar he took from the nursing home dining room and wrapped in a paper napkin as a horse offering. He offers it on his flat palm, a skill learned with milkmen's and bakers' horses fifty years ago. He remembers that reaching up a back-arched hand to the big teeth and prehensile leather lips had been his six-year-old equivalent of putting your head in the lion's mouth. The bored horse deigns to accept his sacrificial offering. The big sausage tongue snakes the sugar wetly away. Gerry breathes the smell of horse and thumps the beast chummily on the withers. He finds he's surprised he knows the word “withers.” It slips into his mind automatically. His mother and father both had country backgrounds. He'd been taught the right words. He thinks he must tell his mother about visiting the horse when he sees her tomorrow. It may be more real than the great-grandchildren.

When the kids go to bed, Gerry, Duane and Gretchen sit in the living room and drink another cup of the catnip-flavoured tea. The room strikes Gerry as too bright. Gretchen is proud of her hardwood floor under a high-gloss urethane. It reminds Gerry of a high school basketball court, too big and too bright. He recalls that a million years ago, in the early '60s, there was such a thing as a basketball dance. You went to the game. When it was over, the lights were dimmed; borax was
spread on the floor and a DJ set up his turntables. Red and blue spotlights were clamped to the basketball hoops.

You could use some borax and sexy lighting, Gretchen, he thinks.

There is a huge, flat-screen TV in the room. It bubbles on, just below the pain threshold. The programming has lots of sparkly animation interspersed with pastoral scenes that have scriptural texts superimposed.

Thou shalt not spice thy lentils, Gerry thinks. He watches over-dressed people with floppy, phone-book-style bibles urging him to call the numbers below. The women look plasticized, too-bright and urethane-sealed like Gretchen's floor. The men remind him of the boys who ran high school clubs, earnest-jovial with a streak of dumb and mean just below the surface, the little crazy glint of “conform or else.”

“We've got satellite,” Duane says. “Maybe you saw the dish. We get all the American channels, stuff you can watch, family viewing, family values.”

“Whose family?” Gerry asks. “Take a tribe like ours. You've got a zoo with Mom and me and you and Melanie's Darren. You'll have trouble finding common ground for our lot.”

Duane just looks disapproving. The television continues to mutter. Gretchen offers a bowl of fruit. As they sit and talk, she works at hooking some kind of throw or afghan. It's in a brightly white synthetic yarn. Similar yarn appears in wall hangings and a covering on a sideboard. Gerry suspects she's practising to knit a polyester angel.

He finds the room simultaneously too big and bright and claustrophobic. There are no books. The only picture is a dawn seascape, poster-sized.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters
is written in greeting-card script across the picture. Gerry knows a bit about the sea. The inscription seems pretentious and superfluous.

Gerry pleads middle-aged eyes and night driving to get away by ten o'clock. Gretchen and Duane are polite but don't press him.

They're probably relieved, he thinks. They've got time for the exorcism before bed.

“We'll get together before I go back,” he says, but knows it's unlikely as he says it. They probably don't want to and where is he going to find a locusts-and-honey restaurant to take them to return their hospitality?

Gerry drives slowly, retracing his route back onto bigger, busier, better-lit urban roads. He's glad to get back where the street lights mean he isn't dazzled by the oncoming headlights. He realizes he's gripping the wheel hard and that he's unaccountably weary. He's glad to pull up in the time-warp courtyard of his motel. When he enters his room, the phone is blinking. There's a message from Vivian. She's called to see how he's getting on. Gerry decides to call, although it's late her time.

“Were you asleep?”

“Not really, just dozing.”

“I saw the kids tonight. I'm in trouble, I think. I took them some fossils that were created before last Tuesday.”

“How foolish. How's you mother?”

“About what you'd expect, I guess. Not much spinnier than the rest of us.”

The lampshades in the room are dark, metallic material. They throw the light down in low warm circles at the sides of the over-size hotel bed. Transient couples have probably found them seductive at some time or other. Tonight Gerry finds them comfortably home-like with Viv's voice, sleepy at the other end of the phone line. At a distance, it strikes him that he prefers Viv sleepy. It slows her down and makes her less abrasive.

“How long did you spend at the home?”

“A couple of hours in the morning and about three in the afternoon. I ran over to the mall for a bit. I had to get out and stretch.”

“You're good. You know that?”

Gerry doubts it. He knows the time he spends visiting is guilty quantity, not quality. Still, he's grateful to her for saying he's good.

“I'd better let you go to sleep, kid.”

“Goodnight. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

When they hang up, Gerry spreads himself, a-sprawl in the too-big, two-hooker bed and falls asleep quickly.

As the week goes on, Gerry finds visits with his mother get better. In large part, it's because he found the photo album. He was looking in a
bottom drawer for some papers she thought she'd lost and came upon the fat, black album. It's a compilation album really, belonging to no particular time, although the book itself is one that started off as a record of a trip to Vancouver in 1946, a year before he was born.

The trip only lasted three weeks and film cost money so it had come nowhere near filling the album with its dimpled cover, made to look like the tanned skin of extinct reptiles. After the last dinner menu and picture of women in hats around tables, there is a compressed version of Gerry's life from birth to about halfway through his life with Vivian. It gives them fifty years of starting points for conversations. Oddly enough, Gerry also feels he remembers his parents' trip west. Looking at photo albums had been a childhood thing. The Capilano Canyon Bridge and Pauline Johnson's grave have been shown to him time and time again. He feels he owns their legend. He has never seen the Alberta dinosaur park, where his mother pats a plaster brontosaurus. She squints into the sun but manages to be jaunty in a '40s hat with a long pheasant feather taking off like the oblique slash sign on a typewriter keyboard or possibly, a quill pen sticking out of an inkwell.

“That's Dad with Bill Brown on the ferry to Victoria.”

He knows this. It's been told to him when he was sick and allowed to spend the day in his parents' bed, given the photo album to keep him amused.

“That's you.” His mother points and smiles triumphantly, as though she's managed to win a difficult trick at cards. It's a joke for her to point him out in a nightgown in his father's arms. His father's head is inclined sideways towards him. It's as if he's listening to hear if Gerry is ticking.

“A fine-looking infant,” Gerry says, kidding her along. “You must have been very proud.”

In the course of the week, Gerry figures out that long visits tire her, so he drops in for an hour or two several times a day. They leave the album out and dole it out to themselves when they need a topic of conversation.