The Man Game (42 page)

No, I'm very sorry. A foolish—

—That another
Chinaman
might end up a boot hanging for a month in the sun? Sir, forgive me for not being amused. I made very difficult journey up here to tell you personally that if Whitemen kill my employ
ees
, I will
sever our
business relationship in equally unpleasant way. I am not content to lose property to inactivity, British inbred. I as soon—

I'm fully a-aware a the circumstances, said RH.

Whitemen, Whitemen, you all the same. I make circumstances.

TEN

A man bows down before another man

And sucks his lust

–
HAROLD PINTER

Back in the day when you were out logging for months on end, the lumberjacks got used to sleeping
eight
in a bed. And those guys who lived in boarding houses in the city, it was the same thing. The Chinese slept in
shelves
. Shelves like the kind in a dresser. To stuff in more men per room. A Whiteman could expect to make a dollar a day. A snakehead hired out his Chinamen for thirty, thirty-five cents a day.

You're interested in history, I said.

Sort a, said Silas. We're interested in the man game. Back then it was a popular event. Me and Ken and Cedric want to bring that back.

It's chilly in here, Minna squeaked, hugging herself.

We're trying to cut expenses, said Ken.

Cedric stuck his neck out, said: What? What does that mean, cut expenses?

No heat.

Who needs heat? said Cedric. You need
body
heat is what you're telling me.

What aboot blankets? said Ken. What aboot sweaters and socks and toques?

It's a way to improve our game, said Silas.

It's a way to connect with the past, said Ken.

It's a way to connect your—, said Cedric.

It
is
very cold in here, I said.

The whole lifestyle, said Ken, reseating himself on the plush armrest of the davenport. We want to know how they did it, he said. You know, how they got by, how they
dealt
. Those guys back in early Vancouver, Litz and Pisk and so on, they lived off their share a winnings from man games. It was all they did to get by. Times were tough.

Because I didn't know yet, I said: Who what? What's a Lizzanpicks?

But Ken, you live off your in
her
itance, said Cedric. You're just being insane. What aboot indoor plumbing, get rid a that, too, and eat bear meat?

It isn't much inheritance if I keep the house. I can't afford to rep
air
it …

So what, how do you plan to make money? I asked.

The man game.

Couple hundred from the bets, said Cedric. Twenty bucks off the beer maybe.

Like I said, we need to cut expenses.

Cedric grunted dismissively and scratched the back of his neck, rolled his eyes, and smiled dumbly at Minna, as if looking for confirmation. But I could detect something else in his critique, as if he felt, like me, that he wasn't being included in some important part of the world, the society of the man game.

Cedric dug into his pants pocket and dropped a few mushy old twenties on the coffee table. Noticing the bulky mahogany thing for the first real time, I absently opened one of its doors and saw a shelf stacked with the bamboo-yellow spines of vintage
National Geographic
s. I was tempted to check out the more creased and worn-out issues, but I didn't want to be caught looking at the breasts of exotic village women
in
situ
; still, the issue I ended up choosing seemed to have page after page of them. It was the wrong time to be confronted with faraway beauty when here I was so close to losing the woman right beside me on the shag carpet.

What aboot girlfriends? Minna asked. Do they—?A second question seemed to linger on her tongue, a more explicit question she was too coy to ask.

Girls don't seem to care, said Ken. Some like it.

Silas said: Do you want to see, we have a picture of Furry and Daggett and their crew in bed. It's a really wild picture. They've all got their nightshirts on and their faces are filthy. I don't know why, but they used to take pictures a logging camps. Do you want to see? Silas stood up to his full bulk.

Where is it? I said.

Oh, it's in the basement. You should come down, I'll show you. It's really wild. We have
so
much stuff down there related to the man game. We've hardly scratched the surface.

Ken said in a mumble: Why can't you respect the decisions we make?

Who, me? said Cedric.

Yeah.

Cedric said: Oh, come on. I'm busting your balls. You know that's why I was put on earth. We all have a special purpose, and mine is to bust balls. I promise. And if you guys want to sleep in the same bed in the cold and eat bear meat like it's 1886, it's your lives. Hey, you know what I always say.

No one did. Silas and I scaled our way down the kitchen and waited for the rest to meet up with us at the tiny stairs. I remembered when I first came in—when was that? half an hour ago? seemed like forever ago—standing on that scary tipped-over entryway between here and the steps to the basement, worried that I'd let go of the banister and slip and fall down that dark, serrated tunnel. Here I was
volunteering
to see the basement, actually
wanting
, despite my reservations, to see the basement, for the sake of a picture of men together in bed, and a strange curiosity for a sport I was increasingly unsettled by, largely because of its effect on Minna.

We got a whole shelf a my forefather Samuel Erwagen's journals, said Ken, and all these handwritten receipts from the Calabi & Yau Bakeshoppe with Toronto's name on them. Things like that.

Things a that nature, said Cedric.

Who? said Minna.

Conversation was a little stalled by us all having to gingerly navigate the weird angle of the staircase. I had to keep in contact with the lower wall as I held on to both banisters, taking a step and then redistributing my weight, taking another step, and so on. The passage to the basement reminded me of pictures I'd just seen in
National Geographic
, not the tribeswomen, but the pictures of people hoisted into spelunking chasms.

I waited in a foolish position on the seventh stair as one by one the other guys let go of the banister and landed on a nerfy chair, there for the purpose. Minna was in front of me and she didn't hesitate. Her landing was not graceful. Her nose almost slammed against the armrest. She didn't need quite as much assistance getting to her feet as the guys seemed to believe. I was last to jump, and owing to a lifelong love for the freefall, my land was faultless. I have, for whatever private irrelevant reason, always loved the suicidal grace of a good freefall.

Once I stood back up and objectively checked out the area, I was the first to comment. What we had was a fire hazard. It wasn't a basement anymore because of the steep angle of the house, it was more of a wood-panelled well that led into a septic tank for paperwork.

Nothing basic down here, said Ken as he slid between two handmade bookshelves and patted a row of slim, wrinkly spines. He said: This is like three-four generations a my Erwagen people not throwing anything away. This is the Erwagen legacy. All this you see. My grandfather's grandfather, Samuel. He kept a lot. And my grandfather's father, he kept everything and stowed away as much old stuff aboot his dad as he could. And my grandfather was out a his mind. He kept train tickets. Slowly getting more and more, over the years, disorganized. These are …, Ken looked at the small type, ledgers from Hastings Mill intermixed with … looks to be old magazines aboot cowboy life.

In most ways the basement wasn't all that different from the crammed-full used bookstore downtown that I sometimes visited when I felt lonely and needed to be around things that were older and more ignored than me. The difference of course
was that this wasn't a priced inventory but rather a pack-rat's intense problem. Whoever was responsible for this basement was the same kind of intellectual as my favourite used bookseller. The back or lowest wall was stacked floor to ceiling all the way across with yellowing newspapers crisp as wasps' nests. That was a little more unsettling than you'd expect.

Ken flinched when he saw me gawking at it. He said: It's two rows deep.

Oh god, I said. Fire hazard. Why not recycle?

Ken wrung his hands, said: I know, I know.

I can't find that picture. Silas searched in dresser drawers filled with leather photo albums of black construction paper, those corner tabs for every picture of one's unsmiling loved ones. Silas said rhetorically: I wonder where I put it then? He searched more with his fingers.

One day I'll do something with all this, said Ken. He seemed honest enough but I doubted him.

What blocked my path was a weedy green brass chandelier from the Cold War. After I uprooted the chandelier, I crept below a door and scaled a stockpile of Hudson's Bay catalogues. The basement was a library of digressions. A wooden file cabinet to my right was labelled
CALABI & YAU BAKESHOPPE
~
RECEIPTS
1884–1941. I didn't touch it. Fear of dust. The bookshelf at my left was used for a long-held subscription to a monthly magazine on experimental bookkeeping from the nineteenth century, and when I opened one dusty volume to the masthead, Cedric told me that Ken's grandfather's grandfather was a member of the editorial board. Samuel Erwagen. The dust on things had plantlike texture. So daunting, where to start looking, where to hide. The sheer amount of paper sapped my curiosity. I wondered: Why me. It was a choice between asthmatic claustrophobia or going home.

Ken revealed to Minna his special cache of musty letters that required going down on their hands and knees and crouching close together. I found myself reading the same sentence over and over, about how a legendary coyote urinated on milkweed and turned it into hemp, for what that
was worth. I returned the manual where I'd found this true tale to its wrongful place among the wrack, and lo and behold, spotted the picture we'd come to see.

The picture was smaller than I'd expected. It was on top of a cardboard box on the shelf in front of me, at waist height. I looked at the picture discreetly to see its value. Indeed, it showed six men in a bed in a weather-beaten shack. One was very small, another two were very huge with only three eyebrows between them, an average man of average looks stuck in the middle, and all of them bookended by two savage creatures, mannish beyond belief, snarling. Coming from every known region of an impoverished planet to share a bed, suffering a life of no privacy to escape a life of no hope. I turned the picture over. The cardstock was heavier than today's memories. The elegant handwriting's faded pencil lines listed the names Furry through to Daggett. I turned it over again. I looked at their condition. They were so foreign, yet I shared their streets. Furry's beard was something to behold. It spanned his cheeks right to the eyebags. With the dark rings around his eyes and the downcast mouth, he was looking tired or rabid, not in the mood for daguerreotypes. Campbell held his chin up; that is, he held Furry's chin up, while they took the picture. Perhaps, despite the serious faces, this was a joke. The other possibilities were that Furry was too drunk to hold his own head up, or that he was dead. Boyd lay there beside a dwarfed Campbell, mid-puff of a cigarette, cocking his monobrow. Half of Daggett's mouth smiled, the other half was showing off a long wolfish incisor tooth. Smith looked ready to go to work even though he was in woollies and a sleeping cap. No matter that there's a huge hairy surly Meier to share the bed with, it looked to me like they all expected to get some rest. The sheets and blankets were arranged. Toes still needed to be covered. Stiff pants hung on bent nails on the slat walls around them. I tipped the photograph behind a shelf. I didn't want to start more conversations today. I wanted to leave. I was sleepy. The picture only reminded me how Minna and I still had to pick me up a bed before I could go to sleep tonight.

You have to see this, said Minna, waving for me. From my vantage point all I could see was her slim tanned arm waving above a rubbish wall. I was glad to have hidden the picture.

I switchbacked my way through piles of unsought-after history to Minna's position between the two formerly naked men. What is it? I said. I couldn't even muster up an inflection.

It's a map a the secret tunnels under the city.

She handed me a notebook open to a scribbled-upon page. At first blush all I saw were paired sets of numbers, 358 ~ 224, and so on. Ken explained they were city addresses with tunnels below linking one to the other. Usually the tunnel's entrance was concealed in the backroom a some reputable establishment, Ken said. One tunnel started at the address for the Stag & Pheasant, a respectable parlour. For a man of RH Alexander's good taste (as an example), manager of the most successful lumber mill in town, who loved to entertain, an evening at the Stag & Pheasant on Water Street was just the thing for his wife's spies to see him doing. It was a pleasure to sneak away from normalcy, kiss the cloakroom girl, and unlock the secret door behind the rows of topcoats to the staircase down to the tunnel that led directly to a private room in a reprehensible men's lounge named Wood's on Dupont Street, where he scheduled his time with lush Peggy, a bottle of bodega and a pinch of hashish, a late game of stud-horse poker against
Mayor
McLean and George Black and the capitalist Oppenheimer while Siwash princesses and Chinagirls massaged their shoulders.