Happiness of Fish (6 page)

Everyone is hungrier or less hungry than they thought they'd be, so the sandwiches and a plate of Christmas cake work out approximately right and get eaten up. The kids are put to bed and the grown-ups sort out bags and rooms and couches and follow them.

Outside, the drizzle slides diagonally through the naked tree branches and rings the street lights. Along the street the Christmas lights
throw out the cheesy welcome of long-ago summer hot dog stands and disco lighting. About two in the morning, when Gerry gets up to go to the toilet, the house is silent and the occasional sound of tires from the parkway at the end of the street is like a distant whir of grouse wings far away in a leafless forest. You're not quite sure you heard them.

A little bit of family goes a long way with Gerry. By the next afternoon he's hiding in the basement, pretending to have to write. Vivian sniffs, but he smoothes things over by cooking a big, late breakfast and fussing over them as they plan to go to the mall and go visiting. Gerry hints at writing that must be done and presents that have to be wrapped. He's practically dancing from foot to foot by the time he gets them all out the door. He isn't totally lying. There's always something he ought to be writing.

Sitting at his computer with a cup of coffee, Gerry thinks that he's always found excuses to put distance between himself and the people close to him. Trying to write something was often the excuse. Today he's holed up in the cellar. Thirty years ago he'd hang out in bars and collect what he hoped were legends. He'd tell them to Patricia. He wonders now just when she got bored with dressed-up bar gossip and when she stopped caring how long he spent away gathering it. Still, he had to play the literary druid and go off to the word-woods by himself to gather the herbs for the potions, even if he only grabbed a few weeds and took a nap under a tree.

Gerry has been working on a piece about his early legend gathering for his writing group. He dusts off his characters, George and Paula, and wanders in thirty-year-old east-end fog.

Fragment: Bars

In those days, George remembers, St John's still had neighbourhood bars; in fact, their apartment was on top of one, a third-floor aerie reached by an anonymous door from the hall next to the pool table
.

The bar was the sort where middle-aged locals dropped in for a drink at noon hour or a couple of beers after supper. George hung out there in the daytime if he was working nights. He and Paula would drop down in the
evenings sometimes, or they just bought a couple of beers and took them upstairs with them. It meant paying bar prices for beer you could buy at the beer store a block away for half the price, but there was something about having a bar and bartender in your basement
.

Frankie, the bartender, opened every day at ten-thirty in the morning and shut at midnight. He and his wife Veronica were the whole operation, except for Veronica's ancient Uncle Tommy who swept and mopped up. He'd be given a beer when he was finished and then Veronica would drive him home to his boarding house somewhere in Rabbittown. She'd leave Frankie in charge until two o'clock. Then she'd take over until five when he returned. From five until closing, Frankie would be behind the bar, with Veronica coming back later in the evening if things got busy
.

Frankie was a townie, but with Syrian immigrant parents, a round little man like a comic grand vizier or court astrologer in some Hope and Crosby road-to-the-harem movie. He'd have looked at home in a fez. The younger neighbourhood layabouts, who thought fifty-five cents was too much for a beer, said Frankie was a Jew, but in fact, “Frankie” was short for Francis Xavier, and he was a pillar of the Basilica and a Knight of Columbus. Frankie gloried in a dinner jacket, cocked hat, cape and sword on high occasions
.

His older customers liked Frankie and disapproved of the neighbourhood youngsters taking liberties, but they couldn't resist pulling his leg about being tight with a dollar either
.

“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the billfold...,” said the barbered insurance agent. He'd been praised for his recitations as a boy and he still sang John MacCormack Irish songs in the bar rather than make calls in the afternoon
.

Others told the story of Frankie and Nicky Dolan. Nicholas Dolan lived across the street from Frankie's bar. He was a thin, vague man with what he believed to be the Irish manners of another age
.

“You don't say,” he'd encourage the person he was talking to, leaning back expectantly and peering through the smoke of a carefully cared for briar pipe. “Did you ever hear the like?”

He became vaguer and more polite as the evenings wore on and he sipped India beer until he disappeared into a sort of warm black hole of civility and floated back across the road to his numerous family and grim-looking wife
.

One day, so the story went, Frankie was driving up Military Road when he spied Nick Dolan and pulled over. He bought big black American cars he could barely see over the dashboards of, and he was proud of the way he kept them
.

“Can I give you a run, Mr. Dolan?” Frankie asked
.

“That would be very kind of you, Francis, very kind indeed,” Nicky said. “I'm just going up the Basilica, you know.”

Frankie would finish the story himself. “And that's just where I took him, dropped him right off at the door. Then the old shagger goes in and takes the pledge and stops coming in for a beer or a swally. If I'd have known, he could have walked, the old bugger. Very kind of you, Francis, me arse!”

Since Paula and George had arrived in town they had been trying out the local beers and picking their favourites. In Ontario, when they were first going out, she had drunk Fifty and he had drunk Red Cap. He still occasionally sang the Red Cap hymn from the commercials that had been on TV when he was in university
.

Cans or draft or bottles
,

It's our favourite brew
.

We drink Carling Red Cap
.

We are drinkers true...

Now they were trying to make up their minds over India and Dominion
.

The writing group gave Gerry an easy ride on that chapter. They like local colour and nostalgia.

Vivian read the piece after he brought it home.

“They liked it,” she said. “You must be happy.”

Gerry was actually sadder for writing the piece. What's stayed with him from his and Pat's first year is pub stories. He knows there were cozy nests of sleeping bags and her old fur coat because they had no blankets at first. Now, he can remember walks to bus stops under giant snowflakes. Still, what stuck were the pub stories.

When did she stop coming with me to gather them?

Sitting in his basement now, Gerry finds time running together. He
remembers the cartoons that advertised Dominion which Patricia favoured. He seems to remember that they featured the Duke and Duchess of Duckworth and the forger who painted the frescoes in Government House while he served his time. He thinks there may have been Johnnie Burke and Father Duffy and his holy well. However, he can't remember if the cartoons ran when they first got to St. John's or later on.

“India, India, India Beer, India that's the brew,” Gerry hums. “India Beer's the best there is and it's all because of you!”

A few days later, Gerry is hiding out in a coffee shop again. It's early afternoon. He worked an early morning shift and he's in no great rush to go home. A police car pulls up outside. It's the silly/cute little Pacer the Constabulary use for community relations, a little 1930s-looking car that always makes Gerry feel it escaped from
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
. Two cops, a man and a woman in the utilitarian new black battledress uniform, feed the parking meter and head off down the street.

Gerry remembers cops from thirty years ago, when he was cutting his teeth as a court reporter.

The Newfoundland Constabulary weren't “Royal” yet when he came to town, but their black delivery-van paddy wagons had a big crown flanked with an ER on the side. You're not supposed to call paddy wagons “paddy wagons” now, Gerry reflects. You're probably supposed to call them Celtic conveyances or something, but they were paddy wagons then. The back of the wagon was separated from the seats by a nautical-looking barricade of painted grey boards with a bright orange life-saving ring buoy hung on it. Two little foot plates were welded at the back of the van and a set of handles onto the roof so that two officers could ride outside like footmen on a coach or the Keystone Kops, waiting to be hurled off on a sharp turn. When the shifts changed, Gerry would watch the paddy wagons roll sedately and grandly up the hill to Fort Townsend, the cop shop, with a couple of constables standing on the foot plates.

For police grandeur, though, you couldn't beat Inspector Jimmy Hayes coming down the hill. Gerry isn't sure now if he remembers him, or imagines the sheer glorious anachronism of him on a sunny morning. He wore the belted tunic the Constabulary inherited from the
Irish Constabulary, with black buttons with silver highlights and a short cape swinging. Square on his head was a cap that was a hymn of braid and polish and, in his gloved hand, an ebony and silver swagger stick. His boots were a heel-tap oratorio of black.

At the opposite end of the police fashion spectrum was Inspector Alphonsus Collins who shared the police prosecuting duties with Hayes. When Gerry started covering magistrates' court in the 1970s, the police still did most of the prosecuting.

If Jimmy Hayes came down the hill like an Orange Lodge triumph, Gerry had no idea how Phonse Collins got to work at the court house. He suspected he slept in the walled-off prosecutors' cubicle at the side of the court room. He looked like a giant toad swelling out of the blue-black uniform with the military, outside patch pockets. Leaning back in a swivel chair, looking at the world over the mound of his gut, he patted cigarette ash into his tunic, and Gerry, although he's rationally convinced it didn't happen, could swear he remembers Collins using the dangling tunic pockets as an ashtray, even popping glowing butts into them as the magistrate emerged from the panelled door behind the bench.

At Frankie's bar, Gerry got lessons in Constabulary ancient history from a marinated giant of a former cop. Lately he writes about him as “Patrick Driscoll.” According to legend at Frankie's bar, Driscoll got into an epic punch-up with Phonse Collins when they were new constables in the late '30s. Collins had got the worst of it. He'd landed in hospital and complained, so Driscoll had left the force. He'd gone to sea for a bit, joined the heavy artillery during the war, and afterwards become a traveller for one of the old Water Street business houses until he retired.

Gerry heard his favourite cop story from Pat Driscoll as they drank Beck's beer in Frankie's bar. He has tried to sketch the scene for his writing group.

Fragment: Cops

“We were picked for big, not smart, you see,” Driscoll said. He was big and dark and beetle-browed and always wore a suit and tie and a good dark overcoat in winter. “There was this big young fellow and he found a
dead horse on Waldegrave Street. He couldn't spell Waldegrave in his notebook so he carried the horse 'round the corner onto George Street.”

The bar at Frankie's would kindle into cop and court stories
.

“There was this old fella, see, who used to get himself thrown in the pen every fall to get through the winter...” The audience pours its beer from the small bottles into the short tooth-glass tumblers that Frankie uses for both beer and drinks. “... Anyway, he chucked a rock through a store window down on Water Street and then he got worried that might not be enough to get him put away for the whole winter.”

In the diagonal afternoon sun of Frankie's, the dust motes and smoke danced in anticipation of how the story would come out
.

“I knows what comes next. I knows what comes next!”

“Anyway, the police bring the rock into court as Crown exhibit ‘A' and the old fella pleads not guilty and challenges their evidence. He says he may have thrown a rock but he didn't throw that rock.”

The storyteller became both magistrate and accused, his voice dividing into an imperial boom for one and a corner-boy crackie yap for the other
.

“How big was your rock, man? Was it as big as my fist?”

“Bigger than that, Your Honour.”

“Bigger than my two fists?”

“Bigger than that, Your Honour.”

“As big as my head?”

“About as big as that, Your Honour, but not quite so thick.”

“Guilty! You are sentenced to six months in His Majesty's Penitentiary! Next case!”

Somebody else has a story about a street character: Tommy Toe
.

“There was buddy used to hang around with Tommy, see, and they were up in court for something and the judge asked Tommy where he lived, and he told him, ‘no fixed address.'Then the judge asks buddy where he lived.”

The bar would hang on the imagined question. Lips wet themselves with beer
.

“I lives right alongside of Tommy.”

The answer completed the lunch hour liturgy and the drinkers would drain glasses and straggle down the hill back to work
.

Gerry thinks of Patrick Driscoll during this year's Christmas shopping. He has to go to a warehouse outlet in the industrial park out by the overpass to look for some kind of range hood that Vivian thinks they need. She said it could be their present to themselves. Gerry thinks half a range hood is a crummy present, but more and more often now, they find each other hard to buy gifts for.

Back when the railway track still ran through the scrubby spruce, Driscoll had a cabin there and a mistress who was not much older than Gerry was back then. Mistresses were officially a rarity in the working-class east-end. If they existed at all, they were more likely called “the lady friend” or “the girlfriend,” but Gerry always thought of Driscoll's lover as a mistress. She and Driscoll had that kind of old-fashioned tang to them. Gerry remembers going to Driscoll's cabin to meet her. He has added the scene to the on-going remembrances of George and Paula.