The Man Game (17 page)

So much a life for me is grist for a vaudeville folly.

Oh, Molly, he said, tearily and with an attempt to stay confident. You want that feeling again, refreshed, anew, overwhelmed by a man, and I can't provide it, can I?

She tapped the ash off the nighttime cigarette she'd lit, then came back to pet his hair more, knowing that his lonesomeness was undone by her touch. She said: I shan't ever betray.

Nevertheless, he said.

It's what I do. Theatre, lights, tra la la. I know I can do it here, too. Differently.

No, you mustn't, Sammy said. This town frightens, appalls me. They inspire you.

I love these men.

Don't say that.

As performers. When you see them, you'll love them, too, as you did the vaudevillians.

I don't believe you. Alas, I … what if I forbid …?

You don't want to forbid me. I'll make you proud. I shan't betray. Oh, it's going to be lovely. You remember those early days when we courted in the empty seats at the back a the theatre, watching the program … the strongman skits? You remember how you laughed?

These men are boors, out come curses like sputum with every breath. I can kiss your cheek every day now if I like, not just in the backs a theatres. I don't need …

She leaned her face in to him with a grin so he could kiss her rosy button-cheeks, and said: Yes, you can kiss me. And no
one else. Now I will simply do what comes natural, provide us with some entertainment that befits this wild-mouths land.

What aboot theatre? The Pantages? What aboot the—, but he didn't finish his defence when he saw her puckered face, as if he'd squeezed a lemon into her mouth.

Oh, she said, it's so provincial. So puritanical. For this town at least. These men treat vaudeville as a London factory boy would treat the opera, a fancy irrelevant treat, almost oppressive in its irrelevance.

Vancouver
is
vaudeville you're saying.

Hm, no, it is something new, better, more physical—no boundaries between natural and supernatural.

He watched as his wife became more animated in her speech, until she had to use her elbow to fully prop her head on her hand so she could concentrate on delivering her words, even as he found himself growing more tired.

The moon was thinner than a smile.

What are you really thinking? he asked her.

Oh, stop asking, she said. I can't think two things at once like you. Tell me what were
you
thinking.

Smell a your stockings.

Tease, she said, already drifting into her plans for tomorrow. Or into sleep. Contented sleep. Her lips were contentedly posed, like two fragments of Greek pottery. How quickly she was on the brink of sleep again, quiet as clay. Sammy could see there were literally sparkles on his wife's skin. He could see them on her cheeks, her neck, on her shoulders, as if embedded in her skin were the tiniest granules.

Good night, sweet Chinook, he said.

She smiled, pressed shut her eyes, and drifted back happily to sleep.

He stayed on the precipice between sleep and stress, trying to sort out good thoughts from bad, hoping to avoid a nightmare. He recollected some events and tried to connect them to his present-day conundrum. His childhood in particular, which he so often denied having any relationship to the man he'd become, suddenly impressed upon him its
formative traumas. His father fleeced a major accounting contract for a coke factory. The old man looked down on his child, and his child looked up at his eyes bulging from the wet sockets below the million white legs of his perversely spider eyebrows. Father raised his cane, and said: Don't enjoy this too much. He tapped the silver tip of his cane against Sammy's shoe, once, then a second time with a little more pressure. As usual his father made a comment for which Sammy had no good response. Those chalky grey, practically glass eyeballs crammed inside his father's face, staring at him. Sammy's bowels cursed his gutlessness. Yes? said his father. Yes, said Sammy with a squeak instead of a vowel.

Light as a wafer under the tongue, his consciousness dissolving beneath a frenulum of blankets, Sammy fell asleep. Molly snoozed along beside him, his warm, inert body next to hers.

Mrs. Litz woke before her men to prepare them for the day ahead. She was up pre-dawn to beat the dirt off their checked lumberjackets and copper-riveted pantaloons. Woodchips got in everything. Dust was inevitable. She dug out the little splinters in the wool of their jackets and the big chips in their pant pockets, even inside their boots. Then she lit the stove wood with some punk, put on the skillet, two cuts of butter, and cracked in seven eggs. The butter melted and bubbled.

Insisting on pretending he was still asleep, Litz groaned and rolled into her space in the middle of the bed, sniffed.

Pisk's eyes were shut, but his grip on the blankets wasn't going to allow Litz to pull the covers off his body at the far end of the mattress. Pisk slept next to the cedar log wall that whistled in his ear. He wrung out every last drip of sleep.

The men loved to sleep.

Of all methods, the smell of coffee was the best alarm clock to rouse her men. Invented by wives, coffee's exotic scent and intravascular kick had inspired men through the centuries
to grunt off to hard labour, support the seeds of love, with time for little else. It is said that history is written on the backs of such men.

As soon as they sat to eat their breakfast, she was on them: I am sick living oot here, eh? Wa, she cried.

Quit yapping, said Litz. Can't you see I'm trying to eat?

They hadn't started the day and already she was on them about things. Pisk was not in the mood. She cried: Wa. She said: What a I do when you leave for work, eh? What a I do? Can't visit Vancouver. Prisoner here. I fear bandits. Find me, kill me or worse, eh. I bead and bead, make me go crazy. You see? … I
must
visit my sister.

Not yet, said Litz between fried eggs. I'll tell you when.

Why. Every day, Not yet. Not yet, not yet, all you say. Yes, the stars move more faster than you. What? Look at
me
in anger? You never talk. You bringem food and, and I see no one but you for so many days. I must see my sister.

If anyone followed you …, said Litz as he picked up his mug and swallowed a second cup of coffee. We'd all be dead.

She gripped the table with her fingernails, making the utensils and plates tremble. Pisk chewed up his food with unconcerned impatience. I am Whoi-Whoi, she said. No one follow me, no Whiteman. Whoi-Whoi live here before Whiteman on earth, eh. Eldest Whoi-Whoi are stones to-day. No one follow me. Promise. I am alone all day, eh.

Listen—

Wa, she said. You work. Me, no, no work, my beads. No one to
talk
with. Wa, she cried. She said: I pluck, I clean, I wash, I dry, I smoke, I am still alone, I—. You, no family. I—please let me see my sister. Please. I must see my sister.

Alls I got is my Ma, said Pisk, a dribble of milk on his chin from the oatmeal.

Your ma live Penticton. Many days.
My
sister live here. By canoe. It is me, Litz, his wife implored, squeezing a chunk of his arm in her hands. I love you. Please. At least I see my sister.

Pisk put on his jacket and spiked boots. He pat the pockets in his dungarees to ensure he remembered to collect
the hashish. Not reluctantly, he stepped out the leather door and took a whiff of the new day. Inside the hut the argument continued.

No excuse, she said.

Baby, he said.

You
burn down Vancouver? she asked.

… No, he said. You know that.

Well …

The clouds washed away any signs of atmosphere, its replacement a white immateriality. The temperature was of a dead body. With a pipe and plug of warm black tobacco, Pisk waited over on the mossy knoll for his partner to finish conversations with his wife. It was a grain of privacy for them as much as for himself.

Pisk snacked. Blackberries were abundant and ripened late, thanks to the slope's westerly pitch. The thick, thistly briar of the blackberry patch was excellent cover for their home, but it was penetrable. He could not argue with Mrs. Litz's anxiety, alert as she was to a real insecurity in their fortress. No matter how often her husband reassured her that a plan was in the works to rebuild alliances, she was the one unprotected from invasion.

The leather door flapped open and Litz paused for a last goodbye, then approached foot over foot in a stumble.

What you tell her?

I told her I'd let her see her sister.

Will you?

No, said Litz glumly. It's been what, near to four months out here like this. Can't blame her for going a tad stir-crazy. She knows winter's around the corner. Gets colder. There's no light. It's going to be tough. What's a man to do? I got to protect her.

Get a hold a yourself. Forget your woes, said Pisk.

Litz shrugged.

They looked both ways and then slipped down into the secret tunnel and away from their exiled hideaway. Mrs Litz knew nothing about any tunnel, she had no idea how they
escaped every day, and perhaps she understood the dangers well enough not to search. Litz didn't take her situation lightly, but as he often explained to her, it was only temporary. Soon they'd find a way to improve their lot. He promised her so.

He was two paces behind Pisk on the invisible trail, a series of exact footsteps through the undergrowth that left no print. They climbed the side of a rockface, where the wet moss dripped off the edge. The ferns were so abundant they seemed omniscient, a carpet burdened with the consciousness of the entire forest. Their rainsparkled green blades and dark interior folds went on forever up and down the cliffs and hills. They poured over the earth like follicles of hair.

A wild rabbit saw them, stopped, and with its belly low to the ground and its ears straight up, hopped once over a rotted log, escaped to safety.

Watch for mud, said Pisk.

I see it.

The fir trees lay in rhythmic sequence, a pattern that seemed graphed. The cedars wore their moss like robes. Nothing died here. Dead trees, white as stone sentinels, grew new trees out of their empty souls. Broom bristles could sprout a bouquet of greenery and draw bees year round. There was great abundance of fungi.

When will you take her to town, then? Pisk asked as they walked.

Ah, said Litz shaking his head, I didn't say
when
, eh. You know, I told her if she goes to town, it's her risk. I don't know if someone wants to kill her, right? I mean, they want to kill us.

Yeah.

Groundwater was seeping from bright green moss. The air was full of cinammon and mint and fresh soil. They caught whiffs of smoke and red berries. The ground was dark, patched with vermilion moss and scattered with bright golden chanterelle mushrooms tucked like hankies into pockets in the earth.

Careful, don't step on the chanty town here.

I see it, said Litz, stepping gingerly on his boot toes around the chanterelles. It's for her safety, is what I told her.

You got to settle your wife down, Pisk said. She talks too much.

Fourteen after all.

Alls I'm saying is I want some silence from her tonguewagging.

Mind your business.

They trekked on wordlessly through the rainforest, pressing back the wet doors of giant swordferns and emerging into tiny green glades of sunlight. They were careful to leave no trail. They stepped lightly around chanterelle mushroom patches and over Indian sandpaper. In single file, they avoided mud under the rubbery duff off a Sitka spruce that Indians had stripped of bark fifty feet up, its bare flesh seeming more violated than if they'd simply cut it down. Jumping across a puddling creek without breaking a single bulrush, they rested on the erratic boulder nudged all the way from the Arctic Circle to this isolated fork on the riverbank by the declension of the Ice Age.

In 1886, it was Doyle's boulder. Doyle logged here, but really it was the muskrats that owned the land. Their purpose was to appear from unknown crevices to eat shoots and leaves, fuck and fight—burly little monsters with wet hair. Pisk counted twenty of them as he sat back and contemplated. It was a reliable rock with a dramatic perspective on life for a man who didn't know his own needs. The earth seemed to lean over just so Pisk would have a grand view. They heard a tree felled by Doyle's hand in the echoed distance. Life, for the moment, was harmless. They smoked the hashish until the jungle was a bubble and they were a mote of dust swirling downward along the contour of its oily surface.

Hey, Litz, said Pisk.

What? said Litz.

Pisk reached into the pocket of his sweater and unfolded the piece of paper from inside, laid it on the rock between them, and gave Litz a short pencil.

What you want me to write? asked Litz.

Dear Ma … Life's treating me well out here in Vancouver, and I hope …