Authors: John Cooper
SEPTEMBER
School began with a slow and solemn shift from summer. Danny felt cheated being in class, given that the weather outside was still summery, sunshine buttering the grass outside with a golden glow, the sound of cicadas continuing to drone in the trees; and yet it was September and the unofficial beginning of the long slow dragged-out crawl to the end of the year.
Danny was in English class, listening to Mrs. Sharples drone on about Shakespeare and love, Romeo and the House of Capulet, and it all ran together like a cupcake that had been left out in the sun; Mrs. Sharples voice was the icing itself. Suddenly, Danny was awakened by her voice. “Danny, you need to go down to the principal’s office.”
The principal had a message. It was a jumble of words in the September afternoon, and the principal’s voice, so different from the sugary sweetness of Mrs. Sharples’ voice, was firm but kind, heavy, like a block of steel dropped on velvet.
“Danny, your father’s been taken to the hospital.”
The next few hours were a blur. His mother came to pick him up and take him to the hospital. At the hospital, they went to a too-clean room that reeked of disinfectant. His father lay prone, quietly; a narrow plastic tube dripped clear fluid into his right arm, near his tattoo. His earring was gone, and his long hair spilled out across the pillow. He was unconscious.
“Your father has bleeding ulcers,” his mother said, before breaking into sobs. Susan stood stone-faced, looking out the window. Danny eased into a chair next to the bed and grasped his father’s hand. “They tried to stop the bleeding, but they can’t. He’s in a coma. Your daddy is dying.”
Danny felt like someone was standing on his chest. He couldn’t find his breath and his head pounded.
Jack spent days slipping in and out of a deep sleep. When he was conscious, he managed to make the kind of small talk that fathers make with their sons. And, despite his illness, he could see the anxiety on Danny’s face.
“Don’t worry about me, Danny.” His hands were still strong and the knuckles of his fingers stuck out like knobs of polished stone as he gripped Danny’s hand.
One afternoon, they were alone in the room. There was a murmur of nurses outside the door. Rosemary and Susan were in the hospital cafeteria. The humming and beeping of technology, the heart-monitoring machine and other equipment was the only sound apart from their voices. A single light above the bed threw a yellow-white glow across his father’s face. Sunlight peeked through a narrow window, highlighting two rows of carefully arranged get-well cards and a couple of potted plants on a table.
“Don’t worry,” Jack said again. “I know that doesn’t make much sense, but I want you to think about what you want to do in your life. Don’t mourn me. I’ve lived my life, Danny boy, and it’s a life that I’m not always proud of, but it’s there, trailing behind me like the wake of a boat on the ocean. Remember the way we looked at the boats when we were on the East Coast?” Danny nodded and his father’s eyes glittered, reawakened by the memory. “Those lobster boats going out in the morning, and there was just a hint of orange sun on the horizon? The waves would drift here and there, but it was still the ocean. The things that happened to me, and the things that I made happen, are still my life. I accept full responsibility for the things I’ve done. I just wish I’d been a better dad. I know that seems to be something all fathers say to their sons at one time or another.” Hot tears welled up in Danny’s eyes.
“I can see them now,” Jack said, his voice had changed and his eyes drifted. He was shifting into another reality, his mind drifting on a tide of thoughts to another place or time.
“What do you see?” Danny asked. “What are you looking at?”
“The dogs that ran at the track when I was young. We’d take the boat out in the morning, shrimping, hauling in nets, and then clean up and head to the track in the afternoon. I think those dogs were so nuts about me because I still smelled of shrimp. You know how they love their seafood. And there was a big dog, Bosco. He was black and had a white marking on his face, in the space between his eyes. And he was a gorgeous runner. I loved taking old Bosco to the starting box. The sun …” his voice trailed off as he slipped into a deep sleep. Danny felt the warmth of his hand and listened to his shallow, raspy breathing.
A little while later, Jack awoke.
“I brought a book to read to you,” Danny said, reaching into his backpack. “Are you okay if I read some of it?”
“What book is it?” his dad asked.
“The Man in the Tin Can Van.”
A smile appeared on his face. Nudging the edges of his dry lips, like the little cracks that spread across ice as the spring sun warms it up. His eyelids fluttered. “I’d love to hear it.”
Danny began. “There once were some people, who lived in a land. A far away land midst a desert of sand…”
As he sat next to his father, Danny could feel the afternoon sun baking the inside of the room. It was the time in the fall when warm winds seemed to suggest a return to summer, though the egg-yolk and scarlet colours of the tree leaves signalled otherwise. It wouldn’t be long before cool breezes would turn to frosty winds. Danny looked at his father’s half-open eyes; the whites were yellowed and marbled with streaks of red. Jack woke up, breathing heavily, and looked at him.
“What day is it?” he asked.
“Tuesday,” Danny replied.
“I was dreaming about something, thinking about when I was growing up. My family had a small property on the edge of town. My father raised dogs there, a small kennel. It was something my grandfather had done for years and my father just picked up where Grandpa left off. We had three greyhounds growing up and two gun dogs, Chesapeake Bay retrievers that my father trained to retrieve ducks. He loved duck hunting. I only went with him once, when I was twelve. I was a pretty good shot, had practised on a range out behind the house — in those days, out in the fields and away from the town, nobody bothered anybody who shot target practise. I spent a lot of afternoons hitting — or trying to hit — tin cans lined up on a sawhorse, with bales of hay behind it. But I couldn’t stand to kill a duck.
“I shot one, once. Watching it fall from the sky, it was like part of me being torn away. I could feel it in my heart.” He reached as if to touch his heart, but his hand made only a gentle waving motion above the white sheet. “The dog, Bruno, was a big, muscular animal. Full bore, he’d throw himself into the water. Bruno lived to swim. He’d leap out of the duck boat into the water, chugging away toward the dead bird.” There was a pause, and silence except for the hum of the monitors.
“But the greyhounds, those were my favourites. Toby, Gilly, and Mack. Watching them run, we took them coursing in those days, you just felt your heart leap. I’d take them out to a coursing competition and Toby (he was the fastest), Toby would go in a pack of three and take off across the course, chasing the bag, shoulders bulging and tongue hanging out. It was as if he was chasing after his own little piece of heaven.… The field was full of rises and dips, and I would stand and cheer him on as he tore away at the ground, pushing himself ahead of the others. ‘Go Toby! Go Toby!’ Dad was less excitable than me. He just watched and made some notes and shelled peanuts. Never said a word, just studying the dogs and eating peanuts. Gilly and Mack were good dogs, but there was no dog like old Toby.”
“What happened to Toby?”
“Ah, he lived a long life. Sixteen good years. He was a stud dog and had lots of puppies. Died in his sleep. A happy life.”
* * *
Danny’s father died later that afternoon. He was cremated and some of his ashes were buried next to Grandpa, in a space in the cemetery near a pine tree. They saved the other part of his ashes, to scatter in Evelyn Jossa Park, where they used to walk Long Shot.
A week later Danny was sitting with the padre. The priest’s office smelled of wood and cologne. “Danny, how are you feeling about your father? Do you want to talk about it?”
“There’s nothing to say.” Danny looked out the window.
“Okay. I have something to tell you.” The padre reached into a drawer and pulled out a scrapbook. In it was a newspaper clipping. “Read this.” He passed a photocopy of a newspaper clipping to Danny.
The story was short and framed a photograph of a car being pulled from a canal. It was dated before Danny could remember; he would have been about a year old.
The headline read, “Good Samaritan Saves Local Priest from Canal.”
“Police are searching for a good Samaritan following the dramatic rescue of Father Alonzo Rivera from the Bradley Canal. The priest, who is pastor at St. Gabriel’s Church, was driving along Canal Road late last night when he skidded on a patch of ice.” There was stuff about how a man dove into the river and pulled Father Rivera from the car, then more stuff about the canal and what a dangerous road it was on. Then the last two lines: “Police are looking for a man in his mid- to late thirties, between five foot eleven and six foot two, described as having a ponytail and beard, a gold stud earring, and a thin build.”
Father Rivera’s eyes were moist. “He saved me that day.”
“Who? God? Jesus?”
Father Rivera laughed. “No, not that
He
— I mean
your dad
. I know it was him. I panicked, trying desperately to open my car window. Then I thought I saw Jesus, the long hair, the beard, floating in the water next to my car. But Jesus didn’t wear a gold earring, and he didn’t have a tattoo of Chinese characters on his forearm. But he had a look of calm on his face, your father did. I don’t know how he got me out; I blacked out after seeing his face. But I remember him leaning over me on dry land, and me vomiting out water. He had performed CPR and did whatever it took to save me. Then the police, the ambulance, the paramedics surrounded me. And your father was gone. I asked God to help me find him, thank him for what he did. But
he
found
me
, and I guess my way of thanking your dad was to make sure he never went without. I owe him my life.”
NOVEMBER
Returning home from school one day, Danny was greeted by a tail-wagging Long Shot. She strode up to him in her elegant, trotting way, tongue lolling out. The smell of cinnamon tickled his nose: Rosemary was baking an apple pie.
After his dad’s death, Long Shot had returned to normal pretty quickly. “Why doesn’t she seem sad?” he asked his mother. “She doesn’t seem to miss Dad at all.”
Rosemary was writing a report; she seemed to write endless reports, filling in information in boxes, checking off details, spending time on her cellphone with clients. She pushed her glasses up her nose. Her eyes were bright, and she reminded Danny of the squirrels in the park, gathering nuts for the winter. Like them, Mom moved about her work and through the house purposefully.
“I remember a story growing up,” she said as she put down her pen. “Someone, one of my aunts, I think, told me that animals don’t mourn the death of people, not the way people feel sad about someone dying. They accept it as a part of their lives, and they quietly know that they too will die, and they will join the person they love again, so they don’t worry about death the way we do. I’m sure Long Shot misses your dad in her own way, I think. But she knows your father’s spirit is with her, even after death.”
Danny paused, then gave Rosemary a hug. “Thanks, Mom,” he said quietly.
He went outside to the backyard. The neighbour’s cat had kittens, and they were mewing on the other side of the fence. Long Shot trotted to the fence and an inquisitive kitten batted at her nose, poking a tiny velvet paw through the fence. Despite her initial concern over dogs with cats, Mrs. Sharpe had grown to appreciate Long Shot’s good nature. She had promised one of the kittens to Danny, and Rosemary was okay with it. Even though she was always gentle, she was a little easier on him these days.
Something glinted in the grass along the fence. Danny reached down and picked up a medal, with his father’s name inscribed on it. The year was rubbed off, but it was a silver medal and there was the image of a swimmer, standing on the blocks, ready to leap into the water engraved on it. “2nd Place, Belleville Regional Finals.” Danny wondered how it got to the backyard.
As he looked at the silver medal in his hand, something else caught the corner of Danny’s eye. It was the glint of hard metal in the sunlight, just an edge poking through the earth. He put the medal in his shirt pocket, kneeled down, and pushed away the long grass. The rounded edge of the container felt like a heavy cookie tin. Danny went to the tool shed for a spade and then began carefully digging at the crumbly soil, which came away easily. He pulled up a metal box the colour of watered-down tea; its sides and lids were heavy and a Celtic knot was carved on the top, like the one on Mahoney’s herb pouch. He pried open the box with the edge of the spade. Inside was a packet of news clippings and letters; they smelled musty, like an old room of library books. The clippings were yellowed with age, but not touched by mildew or mould.
Danny took the box inside the house. He carefully opened a newspaper article. “Local Sailors Rescue Shipwreck Victim in Gulf.” There was a picture of his father — a much younger version — shirtless, wearing cut-off jeans, with his hair tied back in the familiar ponytail and a droopy moustache like baseball players used to wear, smiling on board a fishing boat. Beside him was a heavily built man with a set of thick black sideburns, who looked like the captain of the boat, and several other young men, all of them smiling. They were standing around a middle aged woman with a blanket over her shoulders. A slightly older man who looked vaguely familiar was in the background, holding onto a stay that was affixed to the mast. The article told how the fishing boat answered a distress call during a storm and how his father, “a former swimming champion, dove into the waters, a line attached to the belt of his dungarees, and, despite the threat of sharks in the immediate area, churned through the waves to the listing boat and rescued novice sailor Maria Martiniano before her pleasure craft was sucked beneath the swirling, choppy waves of the Gulf of Mexico.”
There were other clippings. “Local Kennel’s Top Dogs Big Winners at Coursing Event.” “Ad Executive Gets Nod at North American Advertising and Marketing Gala.” There were other stories and pictures that showed a side of his father he had never seen: a smiling young man, bright and full of life, ready to put himself in danger’s way to help others, without caring that it might not be a great idea. There was a faded colour photograph of his dad on board one of the ships Greenpeace use to stop whalers from making their kills in the Pacific. His father’s face was sunny and his eyes sparkled. It looked like it was late afternoon and sunlight splashed across the deck of the ship. Next to him was a man with a wild-looking beard that flew in all directions with the wind; he wore a beaded headband and a look of keen intensity. On the back of the photograph his dad had written, “Bob Hunter and me.” Danny knew that Bob Hunter was one of the founders of Greenpeace.
Tucked underneath all of that was a love letter that still smelled of lemon and lilacs (
What a strange combination!
Danny thought) as if the letter had been written yesterday. But the date would have put his dad at seventeen; he figured the writer, whose name was Amy, must have been no more than sixteen. In sweet curling script with smiley faces dotting the
i
s and a thick underlining of words like
love
, the letter spoke of caring and longing and warm hugs and holding hands and walking along a beach. Danny imagined what his father must have meant to this girl when he was young, and Danny wondered what his father did, what the girl Amy did, or what both of them did, to bring their relationship to an end.
It made him wonder: Danny had always loved his father, but had got used to seeing Jack as tired, aging, his energy spent. He remembered a summer day when he was about ten, and they were driving across a stretch of county road, and the car ran out of gas,
sput-sput-sputtering
to a halt, and Danny had felt like they would be swallowed up by the heat and the harsh sun. Danny knew that Jack’s alcoholism had taken a toll on his body, and sometimes he was like a car that had run out of gas, out on a lonesome highway. But then he remembered how his father had turned that day into an impromptu adventure by the side of the road, how Jack had trooped off down the highway, gas can in hand, to a service station a few kilometres away, then hitching a ride back with a chicken farmer and 500 squawking hens.
Danny paused, and a flood of memories came back, of small kindnesses and hugs and bedtime stories, walks through the park, and the spark of enthusiasm in Jack’s hazel eyes. He had a depth of caring that had no limits, no bottom. And here in this metal box was evidence of a life more fully lived, of his father loving others and laughing and being a … well, a hero. He rolled the word around in his mind:
Dad was a hero, but he never talked about it
.
THE BIG TOURNAMENT
His father’s death sat heavily in a corner of Danny’s conscience. Now Danny was faced with tackling his own emotions and finding the courage to go to the big tournament he’d been preparing for. His father had wanted that.
“When’s the tournament?” he would ask, then check the calendar. It was already written in red pen. “Can’t wait to go. You’re going to kick the crap out of the competition, my boy.” Whenever he got excited like that, Danny noticed the creases in his face, crow’s feet crinkling at the corners of his hazel eyes. It made him look older but also kind of cheerful. Danny could see, like a snapshot from the future, what his father would look like at seventy or seventy-five. But here he was, dead at sixty.
Tournament day loomed like a giant sitting on a mountain that Danny was in the shadows of. The big redheaded kid would be at this one, and Danny knew he was in for a battle.
He’d been training at home with a weight set his mother bought, and which he and his father set up in the basement. He continued with his push-ups and sit-ups. He continued running, moving to greater distances and through interval speed training. Long Shot trotted alongside him and, for her, it was just a warm-up. But he didn’t take her for the flat-out runs. Now it was time for her to really enjoy her retirement.
He kicked the soccer ball around with Ben and, in the basement, Danny bench-pressed increasingly heavier weights and secretly felt good about the steely tone of his biceps.
The day of the tournament came. In the early morning, he sat in a corner of the basement and tried to meditate the way Sensei Bob had taught him. Counting his breaths, looking at a spot on the wall. Cross-legged, his hands carefully placed in an oval in front of his bellybutton, in a position Sensei Bob called the “cosmic mudra.”
“Do this, and do it this way,” Sensei Bob had told him weeks ago, sitting down on the
dojo
mat and instructing Danny to sit across from him. “Think only of your breathing. Think of nothing other than counting each breath. Don’t try to force yourself to
not think
— just let your mind wander. Think of nothing except counting your breaths. Count your breaths up to twenty, then start over again.” Sensei Bob had set a timer next to Danny, one that wouldn’t tick, so there would be nothing else to focus on. “You must learn to relax. Lift your shoulders, hold them for ten seconds, and then let them sag and begin counting your breaths. Look at a point on the mat but always work to ensure that you keep your back straight.” Danny had started with five minutes, then worked up to ten and then twenty.
“Meditation is a funny thing,” he said to Sensei Bob later. “It’s like I’m not quite going to sleep, but I’m very relaxed. I really needed the timer to make sure I didn’t go overtime. Otherwise I would have lost track of time.”
“That’s kind of what you want to do,” Sensei Bob laughed. “You want to reach a point where you lose track of everything, even yourself.”
Danny’s mother drove him to the tournament. There was a sea of people in the community centre, some for judo, others for a hockey tournament that was also happening there. The judo room had a crowd of competitors, all with different belts. Danny warmed up. He thought of his father. It might be a bit cliché to dedicate the competition to his dad, but the thought skipped into his head anyway.
For Dad
.
He eyed the competition. They were all taller than him. One competitor, a rough-looking character with thick hands and a wild-looking goatee, must have weighed about 275 pounds. Because it was an open competition, he could face anybody. One boy, big and red-headed, was sneering at him. He seemed familiar, like Danny had seen him before. But he knew this kid was quite a bit older and went to a different school.
What’s that guy got against me?
Danny thought.
Sensei Bob was on another mat, getting ready to judge the younger kids. He winked at Danny and gave him a thin smile.
Sensei Bob doesn’t seem too worried
, Danny thought,
but then he’s not going to go up against a behemoth
.
Danny said hello to the other fighters from his club, three boys and two girls; he didn’t hang around with them outside of the
dojo
. He stretched some more, then sat and waited patiently for the matches to start — or as patiently as he could, for his name to be called.
His first match was against a rangy kid from the Budokan Club. Danny remembered him from a previous competition. He was a skinny kid but fast. Sensei Bob’s words came to him as he looked across the mat and up at his opponent. “Never lift your arms above your shoulders. Turn, turn, the opponent, and if you’re shorter, close the gap. Don’t let them use their longer reach to their own advantage.”
Danny handled his opponent well, pulling and shifting and moving him about the mat, hearing only the huffing of his own voice and the scuffing of bare feet. He used the
osotogari
move, sweeping his leg to the outside, then drawing his opponent over his own leg and down onto the mat. He won that match, then the next two, and then he faced the big kid with the red hair.
The kid had been furious, watching him before the match, and now that they were tangling, he was trash talking, just low enough that the referee couldn’t hear. “I’m putting you down, D-minus.”
Why is he calling me D-minus?
Danny wondered. Only a few people — rotten, stinking, nasty people — called him that. He spun the kid around, whacking at his ankles with his feet, then took a misstep and the kid managed to drop him to the mat, clumsily so it would take a pin for him to win. He wrapped his arm around Danny’s neck. It was supposed to be a hold that would lock him down, but Danny could fell pressure.
“You’re
choking me
,” he managed to get out; he felt dizzy, and darting lights, like trails of tiny silver fish, swam in front of his eyes.
“You broke my brother’s nose, you son of a …” Then Danny realized why this guy was so familiar. The same eyes, the same jaw line, the same angular face. It was the brother of the kid he’d beaten up in the school hallway.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your brother,” Danny said, knowing that the clock was ticking. They spoke in harsh, strangled whispers, Danny’s mind dancing on the edge of consciousness, the big kid in a fury of uncontrolled anger, but still aware that the judge could haul him off at any time, disqualifying him.
“I don’t freaking care!” he hissed. “You’re gonna pay for it.” Big Red was angry, tightening his grip.