Ride Around Shining (20 page)

At the very end of the row was a white suit with pinstripes of faint silver. I pulled on one of its sleeves approvingly.

“That don't fit me no more,” he said, his jaw clenching around the words.

I said I thought we could give it a try.

The suit didn't seem so tight on him, but he struggled with it, and I wondered if he wasn't playing up his injury a little as he pulled on the snow-bright pants. “Where's your white hat?” I asked as I watched him buckle laboriously.

At last he stood before the mirror in the crisp suit of the pimp. His face was haggard with the morning, and a little seed of sleep still notched his eye. I came up and brushed one of his lapels to give him some confidence. “Very nice,” I said, handing him his cane. “A real lady's man.”

His suffering eyes watched me in the mirror. “Where to now?”

“I want to show you my room,” I said. He'd still never seen it, and I wondered if he knew what a cell it was, how degrading.

“Sure,” he said, in a tired, beaten voice. “But hey. We don't need that thing. We can just go like we are.”

“What thing?” I asked brightly, letting the spear dip a little in my hand.

“That weapon you holding on me,” he said. “If that's what you're doing.”

I jerked the spear up defensively. I didn't want to acknowledge it was a real iron thing held against him. It was only a sort of emblem, of his sins against his faith and his code. While I held it, I'd have the power. It was simple. Holding it, I could show him what he'd done very clearly and simply, like I couldn't in words.

“It's not like that at all,” I said.

“No?” His voice seemed to grow a little stronger, now that the spear had been spoken of.

“I'm just holding it,” I said.

“It's pointed at me,” he said, in a stronger voice still, tinged with mock confusion.

I almost told him that it wasn't, that it wasn't pointing at him or wasn't a spear at all, but I could hear how it would sound, the absurdity, and how it would feel to plead for him to obey me without mentioning the instrument of his subservience.

“It's meant for throwing,” he said. “You ever throw a spear?”

“In a play.”

“A real one?”

“I made it real.”

“Yeah? Well you want to heave this one? Let it fly off the balcony maybe?”

“Maybe later,” I said. My voice was shaking a little.

“You don't gotta hold that on me, Jess,” he said, looking me in the eyes now, with his infuriating face, that summoned dignity easily even in disgrace. “I get what you think I done. I get why you mad. You don't need a spear to show me. Let's just give it a toss and then, what the fuck, we'll talk about it. Okay?”

I tried to stay wary, but his voice lulled me. I could feel my command and my invention falling away, and it seemed now that he was giving me an out. This toss was almost the only way I could think of now to get the spear away from me, to edge back into some kind of regular life. We turned to the sliding door beyond the half-shut curtain.

“After you,” I said, and he drew open the door easily and limped out ahead of me onto the balcony. The sound of birds came at me through the morning wet, their cries like the far-off turn of a winch.

As I stepped to the door, I saw it all unfolding. I saw him standing aside, arms spread wide, convincing me of his passivity and benevolence. I saw him telling me how to throw the spear, coaxing it onto my shoulder. I saw myself standing in the doorway, backing up partway into the room to get a full stride—even measuring out the steps on a practice heave. I felt the spear in my hand, flopping heavily at its ends, and knew how pitiful this great warrior heave would be. But I saw myself imprisoned by this fate, and by his coaxing, unavoidably. I saw myself already striding forward, pivoting into the heave with my sad, stringy arms. I saw the spear release and dive, and heard it clang down pathetically on the patio below.

Before the sound had died away he'd be on me. I could hear his curses and feel myself go under. I could taste his black fists on me. He could probably lift and hurl me off the balcony easily enough—I'd sail as far as the spear. And all the while he'd be talking. I imagined him telling me how it was with Odette, to infuriate me, or defending himself with righteousness and great skill, so even as I was being beaten I would begin to regret my hasty judgment, to feel that his code remained unbroken, his noble faith unsquandered. As the blood filled my mouth I would come to see how right he was to take Odette in, to prove to himself how much he loved his own wife. Of course it'd been that way, I'd decide; it made sense now. I'd hear it all, and wish yet again to switch places with him, and I'd think of how even this, the thrashing of a small man who'd stepped beyond himself, would just be a savage little blip in his life, and then I would think of my own shriveled, duplicitous existence scrolling automatically forward without reward or meaning.

So, even though it was a small and pathetic thing, next to this culmination, I just locked him out there. He heard the sound of the door in its runner and turned and tried to get himself in the gap, but his knee failed him and he fell heavily against the pane. His hands flashed out and scrabbled against the glass, but I shut the door and clicked the lock in place.

I knelt to where he was, and we looked at one another through the glass.

“You shouldn't have done that,” I said.

His face broke open a little then, into helplessness and pleading, and there wasn't any nobility anymore, just youth and fatigue and the premonition of his lasting discomfort. For an instant I felt I'd won, that I'd found myself an out in a last flash of intuition, but I knew it wouldn't last, that in another second all I would find to wish for was that it'd been someone else who'd imprisoned him, so I could be the blameless one, to come and rescue him, and get his thanks.

Driving back to town
, I was sure helicopters would descend at any moment and beat the air above me into sound. I waited for the megaphone blast, the distorted voice from the heavens and its orders. I thought about how I'd always had an affinity for Canada and hoped to spend more time there. I thought of big empty Nunavut, of whether there were outlaw communities on Hudson Bay, of the beauty of Vancouver and what a shame it was they had to draft Steve Francis and Big Country Reeves and fail until they turned into Memphis. But I'd like it there, as I liked all places where the cold discouraged people from achieving anything for large parts of the year. Goat wouldn't be some towering figure in my life. Driving for him in Toronto would be like driving for some young fop who'd once had a hit song on the radio. I'd buy him car wax and mustache wax, and adopt all his lesser vices for my own, for the sake of companionship, and in hopes of someday despising his greater ones less.

After that, there could even be Europe. I saw the crumbling stone of some old seat of culture, the violet hour in a Belgian village, and the lights of cafés glistening on the water in Greece. For a moment it seemed like a tour that could go on almost endlessly, as inexhaustible as Goat's gradual decline through worse and worse leagues and my own capacity for reinvention. And then I reached the city I lived in, and realized I didn't know which exit to take, to get to where I ought to decide to be going.

I'd taken the Mazda, to show I wasn't going rogue or anything. I blew north along the east bank, postponing my decision, thinking I might lose myself awhile on Hayden Island, or in the anonymous Couve. But coming up to Broadway, I saw the signs for event parking and pulled onto the ramp.

At the entrance to the makeshift lot, the yawning attendant looked at me strangely. “Game ain't till five! We just stakin' out now.”

“Can I park all day?”

“I guess,” he said, but his laugh was like a cackle at something people had never stooped to doing, and I reversed and drove on.

From Broadway it was an easy trip northward, past the barred shops advertising phone cards to the gleaming new blocks of Alberta. Stopped at a long light, I sent Antonia a message about the game. She'd been hinting at wanting to meet up, and while it seemed an odd venue for a talk, what with the cheering and the children, the spilled concessions, I did have the tickets; they were a valuable commodity. She didn't get back to me, though—she was always quick or not at all, and again the day stretched out ahead of me, aimless, perilous, and much too long. I was so near her neighborhood already, I thought I could park just a minute and take a look.

I'd expected her house to be bursting with life, with flowers and odd metal sculptures and the sharp smells of new herbs. Yet it wasn't much changed. She'd painted the porch rails a more muted color, but the place still had a spare look. The porch was empty save a thick welcome mat and a table with a single chair, and though the shades were up I could see no plants or decorations—no life, nor anything to suggest it. Her scooter was gone, and I sat ten minutes and saw no movement. I rolled down the window and a set of wind chimes tolled softly in the absence of human voices.

I got out and strode up to the porch with my head down and knocked before I could unnerve myself. Without waiting for a reply, I went around the side of the house where I couldn't be spied from any window. No one came to the door.

There was a handsome wooden fence in back, too high to see over, enclosing the small yard. Twice I tried to scrabble over, but each time fell back defeated. I walked round to the other side of the house, and there let myself in by the open gate.

The yard was barren, just weak old grass and a small, unimproved concrete patio. Three bags of soil lay neatly stacked next to a bright tin can holding a few cigarette butts. I tried the sliding door, telling myself I only wanted to know if it was locked. It opened without a sound. I stood a moment on the threshold, letting the stale house air seep outward.

I don't claim to know all the ways people live when they live alone, but even if I've learned nothing from loneliness, I can at least identify it with the expertise of long experience, and as I walked through the small, sparse rooms, I knew that whatever it meant for Antonia to buy that house, and for Calyph to make her go live in it, she was deeply alone there. Our fear that she had another fell away a little more with each new room: the kitchen with its counter strewn with takeout menus and shelves of still-packed boxes; the hallway, empty of all decoration save for some dusty rubber mice kicked up against the wall; the tiny, dark bathroom, where a value-sized box of tampons sat open beneath the sink like an oblique feminist gesture.

In the living room I sat in an antebellum rocking chair and stared at one of the few accumulations of life in the house. It was her record player, and she'd bought every album I'd recommended to her and more—even the early releases I'd never managed much interest in. I put on something in a sleeve with an empty blue highway and went and cracked the bedroom door.

The room was a mess. A kerchief hung askew from an ugly ceiling fixture like it'd given up trying to do anything about it. A cereal bowl sat on the nightstand, giving off the sweet smell of stale grain. There were little socks everyplace. I'd cleared off a spot on the bed and was considering a nap when I felt the strangeness of how much space I had. The bed took up most of the room; I stretched out my arms in both directions and met no edges. Putting my hand beneath the spread, I felt the extremely fine sheets. I felt myself lying over the hollow her body would make, obscuring it, blotting out the faint traces of the tiny curl of her limbs in the soft immensity. I got up and took a step back and studied the bed anew. Without any thought in my head, I brought out my phone and took a grainy and uneven picture of the thing. This was not a bed for lying alone, nor even for lying with another of normal size—the caption would read s
econd home
. I was trying to send it to myself when I heard a soft jangling noise, and then a bounding shape appeared from nowhere and with a triumphant hork the serval bit me on the thigh.

In the Rose Garden
, Calyph was everywhere. I turned down the program and the stat sheet only to see his face beaming out from the wall along the escalator, airbrushed of every complicated emotion. In the gift shops you could buy a little stuffed bear wearing his number at a discount price. I saw a Native kid with beaded, braided hair wearing his jersey and wanted to run after him and ask if he knew what number eight had done.

It was my first live ticket in years, and the game felt unreal. Tiny in the wide arena, the players looked somehow semiprofessional. They all ran so fluidly, but their moves seemed basic and unremarkable, and even when Oden took a rebound and threw it down so the stanchion shook, it looked like there must be a hundred other guys from Indiana who could do it just as well.

I looked for Goat and he wasn't there. There was a lanky guy stretching in warm-ups in the corner off the end of the bench, obscured by the third-string center. I could just see his bony wrists when he touched his toes. For a quarter I assumed it was Lucas, like he was so new they couldn't find a chair for him, but then he got up and jogged back to the locker room and it was just an injured Spaniard everyone knew was headed back to Europe.

For the first time in days I felt the pocket buzz. “Already here,” the phone said.

I stood and excused myself into the nachos of the family next to me.

“Quarter just started,” the husband complained.

On the concourse I went for a binocular kiosk. The woman was pulling the vendor's umbrella out of its stand but her wares were still displayed.

“We're all out of ‘Better,'” she said.

There was a “Good” for twenty that looked like a toy and a “Best” so bulky and complicated it must have had real scientific value, for fifty-five. Going back to my seat, I felt like I had a microscope around my neck.