Our friends and family are starting to put a halo on me which you know I don't deserve and I know I don't want. You told me from the start that you wanted a wife, not a nurse. I'm prevented from being one and I'm gambling that it's better if I'm not the other. Better, yes, for everyone. I've never risked more, and I've never admired you more than in thinking, at some incommunicable level, you agree I should go.
Until you and I had Andrew, I could never have understood that bravery can be shared. Please believe that I think part of the compulsion I feel is bravery, and it's a three-sided bravery: yours, mine and Andrew's. No one else's, ever.
Respectfully but shamefully yours,
Pat
Hoping to blunt the wounds he knew this letter would deliver, Stan read it in the prison parking lot just before a shift, the time when he normally had to seal off all emotion. But he had waited in the parking lot too long. Another vehicle approached and idled. Stan looked up to a stone-faced prison guard idling in a rugged pickup truck. A mounted shotgun bristled the cab's still air. To those who patrolled the borders of a prison, you were either going in or out; there was no in-between.
Back in their September and October, Andrew could barely pull himself away from Betty to go riding. He cancelled on Mark twice in a row and began to lose the hard edge of speed he'd sharpened all summer. Consenting to a ride late in October, riding behind Mark once more, Andrew saw his shaved calves again as if for the first time. One ascent shed trees, shrubs and grass as the trail climbed a giant slab of naked pink granite. This bank of Canadian Shield held just a few patches of soil and supported only the most tenacious of pines, the most gregarious tufts of cedars and then finally dead patches of grass as the incline increased. Direct sunlight and the rock's store of ambient heat made the steep climb triply hot. Slower, they were finally caught by the sweat they'd been fleeing. Drooped foreheads poured. Arms and calves shone.
Rational thought, let alone liberal thought, was too heavy for the hot climb. On flat land Andrew would never have agreed to a statement like,
Women shave their legs; men don't
. Live and let shave. But here on the climb, two sleek category mistakes bulged and gleamed in front of him. Tiny sub-strands of Mark's muscled calves glistened like facets of a jewel, individuated one minute in the late afternoon sun, then gathering into a cohesive whole the next. Even overweight men can have fit-looking calves. Hang thirty extra pounds between a man's nipples and his knees, give him that heart-attack pouch, and his calves can still look muscular. For the lithely fit, take away hair and how different is the male calf from the female? Tanned and glowing in front of him was not only calf, but also the naked, hairless cleft behind the knee, that sweet spot of â Climb, Andrew, just climb.
At the top, when the waiting Mark pointed to Andrew's legs and said, “It's all that hair slowing you down,” Andrew tried not to betray his alarm. (He's more fit than you, not telepathic.) When he later thought he had closed a gap between them on the trail, Mark shot
on ahead and slipped a corner. Cursing inwardly, bleeding sweat, Andrew cornered to find Mark pissing off a cliff. Mark had turned his side to the trail, not his back. The black rim of his lowered shorts spilled down square hips and strung twice-naked balls.
“What, you didn't know a razor could go this high?” Mark asked.
Back on the trail, Mark took a brutal pace.
Later that week, in the warm glow of the Kingston house, Andrew had started to tell Betty about this glimpse of Mark as she shaved his legs. His slick legs aroused her as much as him, so he'd told her that Mark took the razor even higher.
“He showed you his balls?” she asked.
“No, no.” Andrew's lie surprised him. “No, he just mentioned it.” What was he hiding? Looking wasn't doing. And Betty liked his gender-bending. Besides, wasn't a same-sex experience monogamy's Get Out of Jail Free card?
“Hey, name part, will shave,” she offered. “Now can we get some sleep around here or are you going to start talking barrettes and scarves?”
Awaken
is not really the verb for how Andrew rises from his forest hiding spot in Quebec to start his night ride. After hours of simply sweating and itching, of a boredom so total he had begun counting how often bugs crawled over him (count abandoned at fifty-two), of hunger and a hundred worries, he had, at most, slipped into a more fluid fear, a general anxiety with a low pulse. Bored or occasionally even dozing, he never lost track of the likelihood that he is being hunted. For prey, even sleep is a cower.
Opening his eyes fully in the darkness of night, he's a camp worker moving from bed to labour, a soldier on the rhythmed push. His lack of food spares him any camp chores, save for a piss. Here is the bike. The cleats make their familiar bite into the pedals.
On this long night's ride, the frame seems designed to isolate his gurgling stomach, a luggage rack to sling this empty bag. Then darkness and his spinning legs draw the hunger out of his stomach. A black cape of fear settles about his shoulders. Each knee slops through hunger.
More than just his stomach notices the absence of the panniers. He's been back on the road for less than two hours. With the Trans Canada Trail still incomplete, and its erratic quiltwork of linked local trails, he has decided to return to asphalt for his night run. Although he wants a road, the Trans-Canada Highway is too popular and too illuminated for his slip through the night. Instead he hopes to hitch the bike to national history. The Trans-Can runs parallel to the river at times, but the highway is much younger than the river. There must be older highways closer to the river. After all, the majority of the country's population still lives within reach of the St. Lawrence or the Great Lakes served by it.
In road time, he has been pannier-free for less than two hours. The bike is a carriage horse suddenly free from harness and team. Pulling cumbrously out of Halifax, what, eight days ago (just eight?), he'd
been sloppy on the turns, amazed at each laden pannier's mutinous gulp. Now he misses the long arcs of steering with the panniers. Sure, they made him slower and less nimble. They taxed his upper body as he resisted them thousands of times a day, but they also reassured him with their mass. Every turn they weighted showed his body that he was carrying a home, not just going home. Without the panniers, the handlebars have become a midnight switchblade flicking left or right with the slightest unevenness. Even a distant set of headlights sends tremors through the metal frame.
The mere sight of the growing headlights has him checking the severity of the ditch and inching closer to the roadside gravel. He has already chosen his line into the ditch when he fully recognizes that he has stripped his bike of reflectors and now flies below the radar of visibility. The growing stain of a second pair of lights behind him doesn't deter his return to the centre of the road. No reflectors wink between his handlebars or glow in the rear. No stroke pushes a glowing little bar on the front of each pedal. He cuts wide S-curves in the growing light, spins silently and privately in his dark envelope until his heels begin to glow.
Idiot. The lights in his lane pick out the reflective heel patch he forgot to remove from each shoe, igniting them with a leaping, indicting conductivity he feels as a palpable shock. He races to the roadside and prays these nicked heels look like a scurrying coon. Enough light spills in from the approaching headlights to reveal the looseness of the roadside gravel and its steep slope into a rock-strewn ditch. His erratic unweighted front tire snags in the gravel he hasn't properly anticipated by balancing his chest. Because the cleats dutifully keep his shoes locked into the pedals, most of the bike, not just its rider, begins to fly over the front handlebars. When the rear tire rises past the point where his shoulder should be, he lets go of the handlebars to meet the approaching, inclined ground. His padded gloves, like so much else, are back in Rivière-du-Loup, in vengeful or prosecuting hands. Only one foot disengages in time, so bike and body wind up in a deformed mule-kick of sharp angles. The caught downward calf is punctured on impact by at least one rock. The bracing hands don't absorb enough force to spare his forearms and elbows from gash and
smash. In this jumble of inclined pain, his first realization beyond ache is that each knee has been spared. Then there's the blood.
His right calf isn't quite a hose of blood, but the puncture wound beside his shin does pump steadily. Lengthening trails of blood on each arm go unobserved a few minutes longer while he tries to swallow all the jagged pain and concentrate on the steady leak of blood coming from his shin. The passing spill of light stays his reflex to hop up in an attempt to walk off the pain.
After the headlights fade, he feels the severity of the bleeding more than he sees it. Hopefully, the rivulets of blood on his forearms will seal with just time and dust. The bleeding in the oddly weightless-feeling leg won't quit so easily.
Removing his jersey he is hit by a wave of the post-orgasmic, cannabine reek he and Betty used to find daily under his arms. Bleeding in the cold night air, he raises an arm briefly to check his scent. Yes, unmistakably, there is the skunky, weedy smell he normally exudes immediately after orgasm. That smell is one reminder of Betty from the jersey. Removing her postcards from a jersey pocket is a second. As a bandage, the breathable, sweat-wicking jersey is inadequate, a failure over civilian cotton. He knots the shirt to the outside of the leg, but can see blood already sliding down his leg before he even grabs the bike. Now pain finds him, slices into him as he reaches for the flung half-novel. He rips out a small stack of pages to make an absorbent pad for the leg and reties the jersey around the paper bandage. Now he packs the knife in his saddlebag. He doesn't like even looking at the postcards, let alone touching them. They could be left in the ditch. Burnt before he rides again. With one of the two tiny bungee cords, he lashes them to the pannier rack, images up.
However thin and porous the jersey had felt in the night air, he now feels absolutely naked without it as he pushes his bare chest into the cold night.
When Pat left, Stan could still sit in the brown easy chair and manage a proper glass of Scotch. The chair, at least, had sturdy arms.
However much it had claimed humility and contrition, Pat's farewell letter was still the record of the victor, the glorious public monument with a jaw upturned and a fist raised in the air.
If Andy had kept the kitchen drawers properly organized, there'd be a box of wooden matches in the junk drawer. Stan could pin the box under his left hand and, eventually, get one stiff match lit. Or he could ignite the letter on a stove burner. He knew they worked. But her letter took Andy hostage.
The earthquake of divorce shook his land so thoroughly that he spent months convinced that her contrite letter was designed to be discovered by Andy. Have children and you no longer know how much you will say or hear about yourself. Every family is a little KGB of eavesdroppers and information-selling. Pat's farewell was a letter, not a speech. These words were designed to last. And to reach Andy, their mutual target. Each of them knew that Andy was still far from choosing where he would live. Pat had sent the letter to a house she had abandoned. Maybe she hoped it would be discovered.
He could burn it in the kitchen sink then rinse away the ashes.
And what of the letter she didn't write, the motives she didn't confess? Above all else, I want a lover, a second body, sweet annihilation.
Go ahead, Pat, woo him with words. Two can play at that game.
In the eventful August before Betty moved in, Andrew wound up swimming naked with Mark. Every gesture either increased or decreased a view of hanging cock. Asking Mark about the gorilla tattooed on his shoulder, that would involve less cock, not more. Get him talking.
“Our high-school wrestling team,” Mark explained. “But it's more about freethinking, not team spirit or anything like that. Gorillas are vegetarians but strong enough to rip your arms off.”
They'd gone riding despite a heavy heat and had mutually agreed to swing down to a section of brook with a few pools and half-submerged rocks.
“Duncan, our coach, started with one question: Do you want to win or eat burgers? Wrestling's all about weight.”
“Yeah, in order for men to be anorexic we need the excuse of throwing each other to the ground.”
Warm water curled around their pale, submerged hips and across their buzzing thighs before pouring over their knees into a greening pool. Warm, firm rock stretched beneath them.
“That's the struggle, strength versus weight. You wrestle weight. Whole sport's full of guys living on nothing but Popsicles and water days before a match. Duncan laid out the math: you need maximum protein and minimum fat per mass unit. That's never going to come from some animal that's storing food on its body.”
Each treed side of their tiny valley, the rocks coppered with sun and the water they wore in place of shorts allowed Andrew to half-glimpse a circuit running through him. Reflex, politeness, modesty or some other current sent his eyes away from Mark's glistening chest, from the water curling over hip and fur.
“Duncan wasn't an animal lover, just efficient. In fact, he advocated lentils cooked in blood.”
“In technical parlance I believe he's known as
a vampire
.”
“Most guys resisted. A hamburger tells you who's lazy, who's selfish. For me it was like a light went on. I wasn't great when I started, but after a year on the beans I got what I wanted. The gorilla asks me what I really want.”
Andrew then Mark rolled off the solid rock to sink into a pool of moving water. Heads and toes broke the gurgling stream as they floated one way then another. Floating on his back and reaching out with his feet for a snared log, Andrew submerged all but his nose and mouth to float fully. Smaller currents surrounded him as he pulled his torso to his heels and pushed it back again, bending his legs into angle brackets then straightening out over and over again, sack and balls swishing up then down in their own small tide. Mark could worry about turning away.