The Man Game (35 page)

Nine Avenue, said Toronto, gesturing to the corduroy road intersecting their path, as if to explain the calamity ahead. North of this line, the earth was scorched black for miles in every direction. Livid green ferns were already growing. The land was spiky and raw and blemished. Thousands of trees were blackened to haggard, dwarfed stumps. The logs in the road were black as coal, covered with brilliant emerald mosses. The tall narrow houses in the distance with their peaked roofs leading to the northern inlet some five miles away, where the Hastings Mill was located—their earnest construction was not impressing the guest. All he saw were a lot of desperate three-storey post-and-beams raised over scorched earth. Houses seemed eerily cloistered in this landscape, isolated from their kin. A fenced yard might not include a garden but rather three enormously wide, jagged, hollow stumps surrounded by a complete mess of broken branches and red-capped white spotted mushrooms, yellowy green, dysenteric moss growing over it all. Some of these stumps were thicker than horse and carriage both. As Toronto and his companion passed one junction, the raised sidewalk on their left ended abruptly in a giant mound of wood chips tall enough to live or die in. The electrical posts at their sides were wireless, long-legged crosses at perfectly imperial intervals, shedding nothing, not light, not guilt, not even the sacrifice of God.

Toronto and his latest guest, this strange new shifty visitor, clopped past the Greyhound Hotel where a man tipped his hat to them from the second-floor verandah. He put his hands on the iron railing and called down to Toronto: It's a man game tonight, ten.

What did he say? asked the guest.

Toronto thought for a moment. It's Monday tomorrow, he said.

The guest shook his head, despairing at the mounting evidence around him that life here was rats, it was outhouses,
it was Indians on this corner and Chinamen on that. The ground looked blasted. Hunks of tree root lay scattered all about. Moss and fungus everywhere.

Vancouver is on a lower steppe a hell than Wyoming, that's for damn sure. Hey now, boy, is that smoke a grease fire, fish burning, what is that?

Toronto said: Always smoke. Always men working. Always new capitalist arrive like you. You look like my boss, he decided to admit.

Ah, so the stories are true. He is a man with no face, a wife who pushes him around in a wheeled chair, and
an Indian
ward
, the visitor said. I remind you a Samuel Erwagen?

Toronto winced a nod.

He's my baby brother. I'm Dunbar.

Was this good or bad news? Toronto was unsure.

… Whitemans call me Toronto, he said.

They shook hands across ponies.

My name is Dunbar Erwagen, said the guest. I'm fourteen years Sammy's senior. Surprised? Oh, yeah, I keep my youth because a my vegetable farm in Wyoming. Cukes, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage. Goats for milk, chickens and eggs for the table. I require only the grace a God and my wife at my command. Not another soul do I rely upon to feed and clothe myself. I might go a month without speaking to anyone. Bless the silence. For I need no one. Ask nothing a anyone. I might say a prayer to the hen before I butcher her and before I sit down to eat, or I might say a word to my wife before bed. Or I communicate through my habits. Language is man's greatest source a pride. And pride is a sin. The Bible is all the company I need, the only words I need to hear.

Toronto made no comment. Then he said, Amen.

Amen, said Dunbar.

Ken and Silas were long gone inside the house and the kids around us started to accept that the man game was done. I kept thinking it must be an intermission, but from the way Cedric said goodbye to the people in the crowd he knew
personally, I began to accept it was over. Before I came here, when I was going purely on rumour, I understood more than I did at this moment. Now, having seen the man game, I knew much less. Minna looked ready to leave. We seemed to teetertotter, who wanted to leave, who wanted to stay. I wanted to stay and learn more so I tried to stall Minna by making conversation. She wasn't listening. It didn't matter that she wanted to leave, she was already making new friends. Some of the spectators talked with Cedric for a while, eyeing Minna from top to bottom, disregarding me entirely.

Quit your job yet? said one ballcapped fellow with razor burn across his neck.

No, said Cedric. I'm still writing that mathematician's guide to Vancouver. Where you been?

I'm still at home. The guy tipped his ballcap to Minna.

Hi, I'm Minna.

Hi there, he said, and shook her hand while looking at her daintiness. I'm the kind of guy who tags around local sporting events, he said. You know what, let's do more than shake hands. I feel like we've been through something together today. Let's hug instead. I think it'll feel better.

She was simply amused. When he opened his arms to let her out of his clutches he held on to her hands as if finished a dirty dance, grinned all down her body and said: Damn, baby.

Suddenly I had to scratch my neck. I stared at the clouds and felt foolish. I didn't introduce myself to the new guy. It didn't matter.

Cedric suggested a group hug. The three of them made a disturbing sandwich. Minna waved for me to join in. I declined the offer.

I'm just aboot to take Minna here, and her fri
en
d, on a walking tour a the home, said Cedric. You want to join?

Nah, he said, I should head.

Powerjuice?

Nah, man.

Well, said Cedric, this calls for a goodbye group hug.

They sandwiched up again, with Minna in the middle
again, same as last time, knees and big toes together and a creamy smirk on her face. I saw Cedric pat Minna's butt. She swatted him away with her style of gaiety. It all seemed a little unfair considering how recently they'd met.

Cedric mated his fingers, stretched his arms out with the tendons flaring at me. He said: We need to clean this place up. Kat, would you mind helping stack up those plastic chairs over there?

I nodded sure. I'm usually willing to pull my weight. Some of the chairs didn't need to be stacked because they already were, some were turned over, and some were clotted with beer-wetted paper towel, and so I prepared my shoulders for labour. I looked up from the mess and saw Cedric with a hand on the small of Minna's back, guiding her into the house. Minna turned and shook her head at me and said: Come on, Kat. She gave Cedric a reprimanding smile.

They went inside together with those faces on, unwilling to wait for me.

I contemplated going to my car and just leaving her. My Chrysler Dynasty was waiting a block and a half away on a suspicious crescent. And I was sure I'd forgotten to trap the club inside the steering wheel. I took one step towards my Chrysler Dynasty. It wasn't that I didn't want to learn more. I did. But even though the chance that this whole event had been staged to create an opportunity for three men to gangrape a girl was pretty slim, still I couldn't up and leave. But if that
was
their plan, then I was in trouble also. I was no fighter. I wanted to be a fighter but I wasn't. It was one of those times when the only smart thing to do is smoke a cigarette. It was one of those times, but I don't smoke.

The grass in the yard was foot-ruined. My bladder was beer-filled. My tie was on straight. I felt ready.

I scraped my shoes' soles on the broombristles of a terracotta hedgehog beside the entrance, flattened my shirt, and creaked open the screen door. They'd waited in the foyer for me.

I realized why I was thinking about cigarettes. It wasn't just the old Siwash sweater hanging on a coat hook next to my
face, the whole place reeked of dead soggy nicotine.

The back entrance was little more than an architectural pause between the upstairs and the downstairs, but it was enough to have coat hooks and a tree of family pictures. A stern family of seven in layers of shirts and jackets in a park on an autumn day. It was difficult to make out faces in the pictures because of the angle everything was on, the westerly keel due to the home's sinkage. It was hard to figure out much of anything at this angle. The sinkage was dramatic from a distance. It was unmanageable inside. It almost felt as if you'd have to walk upside down to get to the basement. Even the four stairs from the foyer up to the kitchen were a hazard, dangerously thin steplets each with its own corrugated aluminum lip guard on a wonky angle.

I noticed that the house seemed exceptionally loud. Maybe water was thrashing its way through old lead pipes or hissing about in a water heater right below us. It was an incessant churning white drone that nagged at the overnervous part of my brain.

Oh, I said, super place.

The house was dressed with senior citizen's bric-a-brac. I was discomfited by the loudness and ever-present nicotine smell. The kitchen was long, narrow, carpeted, with a stove built into the wall and a breakfast nook that hung off the end, and the whole room had its own smell. It was the smell of moist homemade cookies baked with socks, cigs, and hair tonic.

The incline in the kitchen seemed much worse, almost an embankment. In the corner nearest the entrance at the bottom of this embankment there was a lazy susan. That most mysterious of cupboards, a merry-go-round hidey-hole for delinquent bags of dried apricots, coconut, and jars of beets, burrowed in its rotating core on the seat of its rings.

My focus broke when I saw Ken and Silas rear up from the corner of my eye, coming through a hallway towards the kitchen, wiping their necks and ears with terrycloth sports towelets.

Ken walked in after Silas, both freshly showered. They wore vintage prototype athletic sweatsuits. They charted the floor's
tilt with the ease of seamen. Silas flew into the kitchen's corner booth. Ken finished drying his hair on the slant. I appreciated the piping on their velour outfits. The dark green piping on sky blue for Ken's suit was an agile combination. Silas's gold piping on velvety black was total karate. It was a good way to dress.

There was a kitchen witch dangling aslant from a curtain rod over the sink, bopping Ken's ear as he scrubbed out a couple bowls in the double sink. All the dishes on the counter were made of unbreakable Cold War plastic in the now-faded hues of our planetary system. Ken cleaned out the bowls, a Saturn pink and a Plutonian blue. There was built-in bench seating with the coarse-spongy carpet growing up the wall to the bottom edge of the wood seats.

Ken brought over the bowls and slid one to Silas. The breakfast table was fastened to the floor in the booth.
Nook
. Silas sat on his side of the nook and lumped his oat cereal with sugarcubes.

I stood there dumb as a nail waiting to be hammered as the men ate cereal in the nook. A long uncomfortable silence. Cedric remained too impolite to introduce us. If, as he later defended, he was in some kind of a brief alcoholic
walking
coma
, some people might consider that an acceptable excuse, but not me. The athletes were in no visible hurry to make friends either by the look of it. They poured more cereal. Therefore I was just getting ready to go.

'The fuck are you all looking at? said Ken between spoonfuls.

Ha ha ha, said Cedric.

History repeats itself, I said.

No, said Cedric. History repeatedly hits himself.

I said no more. After a long, quiet interlude listening only to the slurping noises as the players scarfed down bowl after bowl of cereal, the talking began in earnest. Even then Ken and Silas downed three more bowls of cereal each before we retired to the heavily doilied living room.

I took the opportunity to check out the facilities. There was nothing out of the ordinary about their peach bathroom
except that it was virtually impossible at the kind of altitude the toilet bowl hung at to get any piss in there. Even with my full bladder I hardly shot high enough to wet the carpeted seat. I was afraid to wash my hands. The panic of watching the toilet flush at forty-five degrees was enough for me. I did find it odd to see there was no shower nozzle or curtain, only a fluoride-stained peach tub. Dry: How had they showered?

When I returned Ken and Cedric and Minna were sitting next to one another on different cushions of an eight-foot-long lily-patterned davenport sofa from the Hudson's Bay. The faded teal green was not unattractive, considering the sofa was likely more than forty years old. They were already nine-tenths of their way through a conversation Minna knew I wanted to hear.

Most moves are classic, said Silas. Circa hundred years ago. We started making new ones.

Inventing moves is why I—

Do you want to see the diaries? asked Silas. Most people don't know aboot—

—Ink brush drawings circa a century ago. Old wilted paper. Really cool.

I sat down next to Cedric on a doily-backed sofa in this veritable retirees' boutique of a room.

You try to lead, mumbled Ken.

In other words, said Silas, the man game is a—, you know, who within the dance is the woman and who is the …

The what? I said aloud.