Shelby (32 page)

I screamed at the moment of ejaculation; feeling both fully helpless and fully alive. Afterwards, we lay flat-out and exhausted, somewhere in the valley, our bodies gently moving, our mouths softly moaning, one step into the gateway (the root of heaven and earth), motionless for what seemed like hours …

I woke up with a different kind of scream. It was quarter past eleven and I had to catch the 11:30 night bus to Revelstoke at the downtown depot. Lucy jumped out of bed, ran into the front room, ran back into the bedroom and threw assorted garments at me. A half-minute later I was half dressed and tumbling down the outside stairs with a saxophone in my hand, a bag full of presents over one shoulder and soiled laundry draped over the other. Lucy was milliseconds behind, fumbling to find the right key to lock the door.

Driving was treacherous; I had to continually wipe the front window inside and out—a precarious stretch—and keep the side windows fully open to minimize condensation build-up. Lucy burst forth in song, singing “Leaving on the Midnight Bus to Revelstoke” to the tune of “Leaving on the Midnight Train to Georgia,” and when I attempted to add the background parts but became confused with their rhythmic placement—the
his world is my world
proving particularly difficult—fits of laughter took us both over. In a moment of reckless bravado I stuck my head out the window and, hair blowing, screamed for several seconds.

We arrived at the depot three minutes before departure and just before my reserved ticket was transferred to an affable looking old man with a bulbous nose and a curious limp. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge snatching a crutch from Tiny Tim Cratchet (as a pensioner). Truth is, if I'd have had reliable tread on my tires I'd have offered him the seat right there. Instead, all I could do was shrug and apologise. In disbelief he stared, dropping his cane when the bus driver verified me to be who I said I was.

Lucy and I embraced in transit, a painful situation falsely romanticized by perfume commercials. Our hug, however, was suggestive of a force that could not and would not be denied. I turned away, climbing into the bus and taking the only seat I could find, six rows back. Wiping away the condensation, I saw Lucy through the hole, some twenty feet away, grinning. The bus lurched forward. She waved and turned around before suddenly yelling:

“I can't drive a standard!” Her hands slapped down on her thighs and she fell into a paroxysm of laughter. The bus pulled away; my eyes welled with tears of joy and sadness. I sat back picturing her wonderful smile, and proceeded to lambaste myself for not having coerced her into accompanying me.

Within minutes, the woman next to me was snoring erratically while her Walkman projected its tinny sound at a level reminiscent of a pestering mosquito. Twice I lovingly asked her to turn it down. Half an hour into the trip and fed up, I reached over and clicked it off. She opened one eye and snarled at me. I retorted with a blank stare that seemed to unnerve her. The person in front of me was bothersome, too—his seat just far enough back to cut off the circulation below my knees.

The rest of the passengers, however, most notably those sitting towards the back, were in festive spirit. We all bellowed out a cheer at midnight—and why not? It was Christmas. On the way back from the washroom a drunk man looking about as fun as a glass milkshake offered me a drink from a paper-bagged bottle. Hoping to avoid a knife wound, I smiled graciously and declined.

“Come on, asshole,” he said, spitting and slurring, “it's Merry Goddamn X-mas!” That was true. I took a quick snort and asked him what it was. He didn't answer, instead throwing out his hand and yelling. “Puda here, asshole! Merry fuckin' Christmas!”

We shook. “And an injury-free Christmas to you,” I replied, which seemed to delight him even further. Returning to my seat and closing my eyes, I was soothed by the Hope-Princeton's curvaceous route and the warm air vents blowing up my pant leg. As much as I despised
having
to ride the bus, there was something curiously romantic about hopping a lift on Christmas Eve with an assembly of other vagabonds going who knows where. Tilting my head to the side, a deep breath uncovered for me an awareness of Lucy's fragrance all over; in my hands, my hair, my clothes, a reality enhanced with every inhale. I closed my eyes and recalled kissing her in mysterious places, wondering how at one moment life could feel as comforting as being sucked out of an airplane with its back end blown off in mid-flight, and at another like the earth and the sky are a uterine wall and our mutual existences are two and the same. Oh the good fortune to be hanging from that mysterious chord!

A jerky stop awoke me in Keremeos. It was ten minutes to five and dark. Slapped by the freezing wind, I shivered as I made my way outside for a quick stretch. Snow abounded. The womb, it would seem, had frozen over. Returning for a second snort from the drunkard's bottle, I was disappointed to discover he'd reached his destination an hour earlier. Glancing around, it was apparent there were two or three others capable of taking his place. I suppressed the impulse. Sitting back down at my own seat, I accidentally stepped on the foot of Walkman Woman and got snarled at a second time.

“Idiot,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, with as gentle a smile as I could manage. I closed my eyes and thought of Lucy.

“Idiot,”
she said again.

Opening my eyes we locked horns like disgruntled caribou. “Excuse me,” I said, “would you mind moving your thigh over a wee bit, please?”

She glanced down at her leg which was as far over as it could be.

“Oops, I'm sorry,” I said, “I mean your fat arm! Ha ha ha! Mind if I call you Redwood?”

Tears erupted, reminiscent of Pompeii. And like those mortified Roman peons, I ran but could not hide—smothered by guilt at my inability to turn the other cheek and see in her eyes the divinity I had failed to see in Frank's. An apology was my only recourse, and I proceeded to give one. The effects were remarkable. Within minutes barriers crumbled to where she was expressing to me in soggy detail the anguish of adolescent obesity. I sympathised, confessing I'd once been rejected by a fat woman—to whom I was wildly attracted—merely because she'd perceived my failure to rise above the neurosis of social stigma. An hour or so later, still engaged in our therapeutic tête-à-tête, I felt blessed to have witnessed the effects of a few kind words. Sometime thereafter, we drifted into slumber, Doris' head on my shoulder, our bodies no longer an issue. Her subsequent departure in Osoyoos, although allowing me greater leg room, was bittersweet.

Arrival in Revelstoke was a nonevent. No one else got off the bus, no one appeared to be in the depot, and no one was there to pick me up. It was twenty minutes to noon, the bus ten minutes early. I stood for a moment, stiff, punished somewhat by the beef jerkey, coffee and Nibs in Salmon Arm, gazing afar as “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” with flutes, strings and electric piano floated out of the backroom. A nippy draught from the doorway slipped up my sleeve and snapped before me the reality of what I was soon to face: Christmas without Gran.

Mom and Dad picked me up a few minutes later. Pleasantries were bathed in melancholia and the drive home was, although tender, strained. Back at the house I called Lucy several times without success. Derek and Kristine showed up a few hours later and announced the baby news to Mom and Dad (and me, pretending). It was a joyous happening, everybody ecstatically teary-eyed. Larry wasn't around, having boycotted (except for personal emergencies) the family and our worldly ways. Ironically, I missed him. He wasn't so bad.

Gifts were opened after dinner amidst sadness, laughter, Gran anecdotes and Dad and Derek, both having overindulged, breaking out in the theme song from
Hockey Night In Canada
.

“Is that show still on?” I asked sarcastically and to much badgering.

“When that
Hockey Night in Canada
ceases to be part o' Saturday night,” Dad said out of context about twenty minutes and two more rye-and-Sevens later, “the elephant has rolled over. Free trade has squished our duffs. Canada: the fifty-first state.” He erupted into spontaneous song: “
Oh say can you see
…” We all joined in and got the words wrong. Mom insisted it was only proper we sing “Oh Canada,” also, and began it in her strangled soprano. We flubbed those lyrics, too, and nobody dared attempt the French translation.

Later on I did a load of wash and took a shower. By midnight, alone in my old bed, I envisioned a wet stream of life connecting Lucy and Gran and Derek's new baby … everyone, in fact; an infinite thread of interconnectedness blossoming out of one big cosmic navel, exposing us all for what we really are: mass murderers, gluttonous swallowers of life—be it plants, insects or the ground itself, living and dying, ingesting and regurgitating with every moment. And on that thought I fell asleep, smiling and thankful, thoughts of Gran swirling. No life: no death. No death: no pain. No pain: no brain. No brain: no joy.

Waking with a start, I considered how wonderful it would be if the hormones essential for fertilization could only be released through the process of true love—a cosmological definition that no level of debate could ever alter. One either learns to love, or the species dies. Truly, then, by our fruits we would be known. Perhaps, I added, that's happening, anyway. I thought of Lucy, and wondered if she'd used protection. Then I thought of Gran and had a little weep.

Boxing Day arrived for me just before noon as I stumbled into the front room dressed only in underwear, dress socks and a T-shirt. I'd never been so casual growing up. Dad and Derek, watching football in the front room, turned and gawked. I stood in the doorway, nervous.

“
What
?” I asked.

“You … you look different,” Dad said. “D'you get your haircut?”

“On Christmas night?”

“I don't know … you look different.”

I shrugged as though ignorant to his questioning. I knew, though; I'd exposed to them the real Shelby Lewis; rebellious, unpredictable, half naked.

“Nice hair,” Derek said.

“Where are Mom and Kristine?”

“Out walkin',” Dad said.

Derek looked down. “Nice gonch.”

“Have there been any calls?” I asked.

“A few … why?”

“Just wondering. Any for me?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Were you expecting some?” Dad asked.

“No, I—”

“
Sheb
by got a girlfriend,” Derek said with his goofy grin.

Dad, seemingly startled by the revelation, turned to Derek. “Does he?”

“Yup,”
Derek said, “nice girl, too. Couple o' heads and one eye. Shame about the foot odour.”

Dad turned back to me. “Son, I'm happy for you.”

“You seemed surprised,” I said.

“Dad thought you might be a fag,” Derek said.

“Derek,”
Dad said.

“Sorry, Dad. Homo
sexual
.” Derek grinned, stroking Dad's ear.

“Why?” I asked. “Because I'm skinny? How Revelstokian.” I walked away.

Awhile later as I flipped through an old newspaper and munched away on a bowl of Shreddies at the kitchen table, Dad came and sat down. I continued reading. He stood up and opened the fridge door.

“No damn leftovers,” he said halfheartedly.

I didn't respond.

“See that, son,” he said chuckling, “no damn leftovers.”

“You can have the rest of my cereal,” I said, knowing I'd finished the box.

“About that gay thing,” he said, “I just wondered what was wrong when we were goin' through all those troubles.” He sat down again. “I didn't mean anything. I asked him a lot o' things.”

I shrugged. “Doesn't matter.”

“You got a girlfriend, eh?” he said as warmly as I'd ever heard him speak.

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“Like her?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What's her name?”

“Lucy.”

“Wow,” he said. “So … uh … had any luck with your calling?”

I looked up. “My calling?”

“Yeah.”

“Um … still unclear. I'm hopeful, though.”

“You know, sometimes I wish I'd … I just …” He shrugged. “Kids, marriage—I used to carve a lot, you know?”

“Carve?”

“Wood stuff. Little people and that. Whittlin' away. I spent days doing it.”

“Do you have anything I could see?”

“Nah. Went into a rage in '62—maybe '63, built a fire and burnt it all.”

“I never knew.” He shrugged, smiling, and I, looking into the eyes of the genetic pool from which I'd liberally borrowed, felt suddenly overcome. He'd asked me about my calling!

“You thinkin' about settlin' down?” he asked.

“Pardon?”

“Settlin' down. With Lucy …”

“Dad,” I said, edging towards him, “as cliché as it sounds I believe our meeting was predetermined.”

“Wow. What's she do?”

“Uh … well, she's between jobs. She's very talented. She used to be a dancer.”

“Hm.” Dad scratched behind his right ear. “Thanks for the golf stuff, eh.”

“You're welcome. I hope you take up the sport.”

He stood up and opened the fridge door again. “You ever think about going back?”

“To Vancouver?”

“To school.”

“Oh … sometimes.”

“You could do it,” he said, pulling the tab on a Fresca. “There's no doubt in my mind you could do it without missin' a skip.”

“Thanks.”

Dad took a swig from his pop and made his way towards the basement. “You could do whatever you want,” he said, not facing me.

“Dad?”

He stopped, glancing over his shoulder. “Yeah?”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, sloughing me off with a wave of his hand. “Oh,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a rustic looking jackknife about six inches long. “Here.”