The Man Game (25 page)

Tell me your story, dear. Mind if I smoke?

Not at all. Mind if I?

They each lit their cigarettes, Molly first, using Peggy's candle, then Peggy. Your brand, she said.

Stars & Stripes, said Molly.

Go on, you were aboot to say.

I was at the Stag & Pheasant not more than an hour ago, you see.

You're from some completely different place on this vast globe—seen it all—and all you want to tell me is how you got to my
house
?

I was in the Stag & Pheasant only an hour ago …

I'm used to girls coming to me. Ones your own age. Not to insinuate that's what you're doing, dear, quite the opposite obviously. I suppose aboot seventeen, aren't you? Lovely age.

Yes, seventeen. Well, the proprietor at the Stag & Pheasant welcomes ladies as openly as gentlemen, you know. Quite a cultured lot. Nothing like the Sunnyside. I saw a few young ladies escorted by their husbands.

Must be from New Westminster.

Yes, and for a saloon, quite lovely. Fine decorations. A hearth. A clean floor, no peanut shells to slip on, a wheel a cheese, and a choice a liqueurs.

You won't find a drop a expectorate spilled in the whole establishment, yes, I been there.

The ladies drink brandy, the men drink scotch or brandy.

Ahh … don't mind me, Mrs. Erwagen, I'm only yawning from the fullness a my memory. You've taken me back, yes, I can see the soporific place as if I was there.

I went to use the ladies room …

You want to use the—

No, said Molly, squinting and shaking her head, black curls falling off her shoulder. No, in the Stag & Pheasant, I
went
to use the ladies room.

A course you did, dear, Peggy said, sitting back in her chair. Go on.

Compared to the polish all over the Stag & Pheasant the ladies room is criminally neglected. Ladies around me seemed well enough discouraged to use such a befouled anteroom. Mould and mildew and barnacle, seawrack, essentially, in the ladies room. Small white freckled mushrooms on the ceiling. Unappealing, certainly. What most caught my attention though was seeing unmistakable men's boot-prints whitening a path on the muddy floor that stopped at the back wall, the clapboard wall, and I did not see a single lady's shoeprint leading to the seat with the hole in it. I found a secret door. The back wall turned like a door and opened. It was very dark beyond. But I could tell from a strange humid breeze that the back wall opened towards a tunnel. Frightened, I fled back to my table and concentrated on my husband and our afternoon together. The whole rest a my time all I looked at was Mr. Erwagen's handsome face. When we finished our drinks and Toronto came to escort us homeward, I begged off and stayed behind so I could return to the ladies room at the Stag & Pheasant. Once I'd procured
a candle I was into the tunnel.

Peggy nodded her head. Your curiosity got to you. Yes, yes, you found the tunnels. She leaned forward and put her hands on the table between them and patted the top of a leather book. You shouldn't have been down there.

I followed the draft in the tunnel until I arrived at a ladder that led to your property.

What do you intend to do with this information, Mrs. Erwagen, blackmail me? I got a tunnel that leads to my coach house, so what? I am one a the founders a this town, that is why. I can't tell you aboot the tunnels. There's not much you can do to me that won't embarrass
you
in the process, with worse consequences.

If the tunnels are part a the city planning …

Now listen, Mrs. Erwagen. You look smart. I trust you. But let me ask you a question: Do I poke around in your cabinets at home, do I? First time you came here, I said I liked you. I said I'd help you. And I will. Pass some news around,
Litz and Pisk are in town
, that I find simple, this man game. You put yourself where I can fathom. I can fathom you. Most can't. That's why I have this home. Your courage, I call it foolish. But I like you for it, Mrs. Erwagen. It's a beautiful trait on you. I have it too. You see, for every lucky one, for every beautiful girl like you or me who wakes up to find she's a lady, there's got to be fifty who wake up all trampled. I won't spoil your secret. I might not be able to hold my tongue for a man's favours, but never and I say never has another lady's secret slipped free a these lips. I hope you know that. And if anything should happen to you, I'm right here, you know where to find me.

You protect the trampled.

I provide for a few.

A girl shouldn't be treated like a wildflower even if she is wild.

Wildflowers, eh. I don't know aboot wildflowers. Peggy pressed the tip of a glistening red fingernail against the top of her desk and traced a shape, a ring of connected semicircles.
Peggy always liked being paid attention to. She mused: For every wildflower we got twenty bears.

If there are maps a the tunnels, if you allow me to see them, it will save me the trouble a making them myself, said Molly.

I can't think a anything more boring, Molly. Don't waste your time. Let me show you something that might change the way you look at me. Understand that there is someone for whom even Madam Peggy will compromise. And to show you how much I respect you, Molly, I shall introduce you. Follow me.

Peggy took Molly by the wrist and they went around the corner to the back door of the whorehouse where Molly had entered, and from there they ascended a narrow coiling staircase to the second floor where they arrived at one side of a long hallway with multiple bedrooms all behind closed doors. No one and I mean
no one
goes through this door but me, said Peggy. She quickly unlocked the door beside them and guided Molly into a darkened bedroom. The only light came from the far side of the room where there was an attic window no bigger than a sheaf of paper. Between the window and where they stood was a four-poster bed and silhouetted on it was a slender child, and as Peggy's eyes adjusted, the hood over the girl's head came into focus. Molly's composure remained unchanged, but Peggy heard the moment when her breathing stopped. Here's your wild-flower, she said.

The clearing on Doyle's land that Litz and Pisk used to practise the man game was walled in by thick old growth, protected from the elements, including wind and rain and Furry and Daggett. It was a natural clearing, not much larger than a boxing stage where no one could see them, and few would even think to look. There was a little rockbed creek that provided fresh water as it pizzled its way to the alluvial fans of the North Fraser River.

At around noon, Litz and Pisk took a breather. They'd been at it all day. Hands on their knees, coughing, spitting, muscles broken, hurting, then stretching their backs, hips, and legs. They discussed the problems that led to Pisk's toppling head over foot and kicking Litz in the face while trying to execute a Wheelbarrow
{see
fig. 6.5
}
. Molly kept insisting that it was an easy move if only they paid more attention to each other. They were here by themselves to try to work it out before they next met with her. Pay more attention to each other. By this she meant to forget one's own strategy and concentrate on the opponent's. Or did she mean to actually wait and drop the competitiveness altogether? Could Litz still slap Pisk upside the head or was Pisk just supposed to roll with it faster? The move involved a lunging vaudeville stomp alternating with an operatic scissorstep, boldly slashing the crapulent leg off a genteel tiptoeing, building up speed with this half-drunken, half-musical stagger for the inevitable banana flip. Litz was supposed to catch his ankles and save Pisk from a fall, only to have him wheelbarrowing backwards on his hands (indeed, the move bears a fair resemblance to both the Spanish Layover and the Boxing Chinee). But Litz overcompensated with the midget walk and got hamstrung in the knee-to-heel pivot. They'd been practising it all morning with no success and now it was the afternoon and they didn't seem any closer to figuring it out. Meanwhile, they were heavily bruised and cut up, bloody from dirt scrapeups like the last one and many more like it. Litz sat down, crossed his legs, and began to pack a pipe full of weed. Using the tip of a knife he smudged a coat of black sticky hashish into the pipe and then added another pat of the weed, levelled off the plug to two-thirds a bowlful. The weed glittered and sparkled in the bowl as if sprayed with the finest blood mist. Above, the rainforest sunlight was yellow in the south and white in the north. This was more than a daily regimen. These were men on the cliffs of the lesser-known world. Proper hopes like a family didn't matter. Children, soup spoons, and a dog strangled to a post in the backyard didn't matter. What mattered was gaining freedom.

FIGURE 6.5
The Wheelbarrow

Calabi's commentary: Any farmer who has competed with his barrow down a rocky slope can master this amusing competition.

Litz rummaged in the pockets of his pants, which lay on the grass beside his toque and woollies, with leather suspenders still tentacled to their buttons, looking for a timber to light his pipe with.

After not a long pause, Pisk said: I'd do anything for this Molly.

No shit. She's not even here today and look at us.

I mean, have you ever seen
any
thing the likes a her?

Never in my life. She's so … Litz scratched his balls fiercely, instinctively, like a cat. They'd lost any sense of dignity and paid no more attention to the material state of each other than they did to comparing the sizes of trees. At the end of the day the forest's all made of wood, and there's nothing more to be said about it. Maybe they'd achieved something like animalistic grace, and that may or may not have been Molly's intention.

Dragging on the pipe, Litz nicked alight a new matchstick and puffed it over the bowl to heat it up again. Coughing, he said: Where do you think she gets her ideas?

Taking the pipe, Pisk said: What?

I mean, how do we know what she's got planned for us next?

How the hell am I supposed to know that? Cough cough. I don't know.

If I'm not thinking aboot moves, said Litz, taking the pipe back, I'm thinking aboot why she's putting us up to this.

Like you say, it's a better way for us to make a living than being chased around the fucking woods by Furry and Daggett, that's for damn sure.

Cough cough. Litz spat on the ground. No doubt, he said. But we're still getting chased around the woods and we're not making real chickamin.

Not yet. But pretty soon we're going to be stacking those blankets. This game's going to burn through town.

Let's get up try again to do that combination.

They shook hands and went through the paces.

Christmas was rather more of a strain this year on Samuel's boss and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. RH Alexander's life in Vancouver, with its vicissitudes of California snakeheads, the mugger, naked lumberjacks, the opium trade—, it was all very distracting, and kept them from maintaining a stern hand in child rearing. The girls were lonely and spent all their time in their room building and destroying doll families in doll houses, reading literature, and weeping. British private schools took care of the boys for most of the year, but HO and TK were home for the holidays. They were taller, more restless and combative, their parents hardly noticing what for.