Happiness of Fish (35 page)

Gerry gets up before daylight the next morning. He pitches some clothes and a washing kit into a gym bag. He moves quietly, trying not to wake Nellie in the spare room or Melanie, Darren and Diana in the basement. Sleep-junky Vivian gets up a little while later and joins in his morning game of stealth. They drink tea at the kitchen table under a wide-based cone of light from the hanging lamp and talk in voices that are just above whispers.

“Where are you going?”

“I don't know. I'm just going to drive around a bit until I feel my shoulders unclench. I'll be in touch though. I'll call, wherever I get to.”

“I suppose I should be glad. I know you'll just drive around. I don't
need to worry about you going off with somebody else.”

“You make me sound like an altered tomcat. That's not altogether flattering. Patricia would have worried.”

“You were different then.”

“I suppose.”

Gerry drags his gym bags of book-stuff and clothes to the door. He rejoins Viv at the table and is finishing his tea when they hear Nellie moving around. Eventually she comes down the hall to the kitchen. She's wearing a home-knit sweater over flannelette pyjamas. Her feet are in shapeless knitted slippers.

“What are you fellahs doing up then?”

“Convention of the living dead,” Gerry says, but Viv gives him a dirty look.

“Gerry's got to go on the road,” she says. “He got the call last night. Somebody got sick at the last minute. You'd better get going, hon.”

She kisses him matter-of-factly, as if he's being sent off to school.

“Yeah, right, see you, love, see you, Nellie.”

“Say hello to George and Paula,” Vivian says. He's surprised. He didn't think she remembered the characters in the bits he's read to her from time to time.

“Who are George and Paula?” Nellie asks.

“Some people Gerry works with.” Vivian smiles at him, a bit forlornly.

And there he was gone, he thinks.

Gerry drives into the morning, not knowing where he is going. He stops at a Tim Hortons and fills the big insulated aluminium mug the garage gave him for servicing the Honda there. Normally Gerry has no trouble wasting time in coffee shops, but today he wants to be moving. He climbs back into his SUV and sets the mug in the holder. He'll run on just the smell of coffee.

He pulls up at the parkway, bustling with commuter traffic. The in-town lanes rush back towards his neighbourhood. The out-bound veer away south to skirt the hills which have a dusting of new snow.

His coffee suspended within reach beside the instrument panel, Gerry is reminded of the days when the space race was news. There would be pictures and TV shots of the astronauts in their fitted couches in their capsules. They were plugged into their tiny environments, working where they slept.

“This is Major Tom to Ground Control,” Gerry sings and turns into the out-of-town lane. The vehicle is warm and he feels a part of it. He remembers somebody telling him that the downside of being an astronaut was that they lived in diapers inside their space suits. The space toilet didn't arrive until later.

Cruising into infinity in Pampers, Gerry thinks. This too may come. South of the last bypass, the traffic thins out and Gerry is following the winding two lanes of The Irish Loop. The shamrocks on the signs tell him so. He remembers covering the fuss when the signs first went up. The designer had put four-leaf clovers on them instead of shamrocks. It cost some ungodly amount to get them all redone.

The sea is close on his left-hand side and there is little snow here, this early in the winter. He rolls past spruce that all lean one way from the sea winds and dips into communities of candy-bright houses and hauled-up boats, turned into still life by the winter.

It's the kind of driving you can do unconsciously, a steady hundred K with enough steering to keep the eyes and body from getting bored. The head can be where it likes.

Gerry wonders where he's going and when he's returning.

If I'm returning
floats just out of reach in the back of his mind. He thinks back to last night's “You're not a bad man.” Vivian and Patricia have both said this. Is it an absolution, an acceptance of a mediocre reality or a wave in a rear-view mirror as the distances grow?

At mid-morning, the distances have grown. The road has stopped dipping into little harbours and has turned inland, striking out across the barrens. The road signs have big-antlered caribou silhouette warnings as if prehistoric cave painters had got into the sign shop. The road is lined with sticks to guide the snowploughs, but there is little snow. What fell in St. John's as snow was apparently mostly rain here. The barrens stretch
away in all directions with only sparse, shrunken, frozen drifts, like white hairs in the brown pelt of blueberry bushes and moss.

Gerry pulls over on a wide spot of gravel shoulder and sits and looks at the huge, windswept flatness extending to the pale bowl of winter sky in all directions. The wind buffets the car. Gerry feels you could fall off the earth here. There is nothing to hold onto to resist the upward suck of space. He slurps the last of the barely warm coffee from his thermal mug and wills himself to get out of the car and stretch.

The wind is from the southwest and it's mild for January. It's like a sustained bass note on an organ, an ambient frequency, felt rather than heard.

“Hey,” he yells tentatively. The wind sucks the syllable away as though it never existed. He calls up thirty years of radio presentation workshops and puts his diaphragm into a great shapeless roar that lasts until his lungs are empty. It sounds fragile and babyish, swallowed by the space. He feels shriven.

Maybe this is what prayer's supposed to be, he thinks, roaring at the sky until you feel good.

Gerry sticks his coffee mug back in the car and slowly walks out on the barren ground. It's like a carpet under a magnifying glass, a jumble of frozen mossy hummocks, tiny water courses hidden in the folds and rib-like mazes of sand and gravel that seem randomly bulldozed into place by the wind-scour. The white noise of the wind seems to be drawing him out of himself through his ears, an infinite sky poultice. He picks his way along the gravel ridges and hops across the rivulets that criss-cross the barren ground. An old rugby song comes from nowhere to his lips.

“Why was he born so beautiful? Why was he born at all?” It becomes his barren anthem. “He's no fucking use to man or beast. He's no fucking use at all.”

His feet dance to his words and the unwritten score of the tumbled ground. His arms pump for balance as he scissor-hops along his invisible trail. When he stops and turns, the Honda is a green bead, strung on the skyline half a mile away.

“No fucking use to man or beast. He's no fucking use at all,” he finishes, slightly breathless. “World without end. Amen.”

He stands until the sweat he's worked up starts to chill. He can see
the highway for miles in either direction. A windshield flash on a hill crest miles away tells him that someone else is traversing his universe. He zips up his jacket and walks slowly back towards his car.

Without the counterpoint of his man-or-beast hymn, the walk takes longer going back. He picks his way now, rather than dances, looking at micro-forests of moss, the Lilliputian lake systems of the potholes and the diamond sparkles in the gravel and ice. The car he spotted crossing the crest is coming up a low grade towards his vehicle as he walks the last fifty yards. It slows just perceptibly and he sees heads turn his way, wondering what he's returning from, out on the barren. He imagines they'll think he's been poaching or having an
alfresco
crap out under the big sky. Religious pilgrimage probably doesn't occur to them. The car passes in a private tornado of sound and dwindles on down the endless road. Gerry climbs into his own vehicle and watches until the car is out of sight. As he does, he sees movement on a low ridge. Three caribou briefly trace the skyline like passing sailing ships. Then they move down-grade and fade into the camouflage of the other light splashes and shadow-play of the barren. Gerry takes them as a benediction and pulls out onto the long empty road. For the first time in a long time, he doesn't feel cramped. It occurs to him that Viv would have liked to have seen the caribou, so perhaps he's planning to bring some of this trip home.

“He's no fucking use to man or beast,” he sings as he drives across a watercolour vastness.

It's mid-day and Gerry drives down a long hill in second gear. He leaves the barrens behind him at the top of the curving hill and rejoins the sea at the bottom. He crosses a long beach-rock barachois and crosses an iron bridge over a swirling river mouth. A settlement hangs on the road like a string of wooden beads, the softball field a ceramic pendant on the other side of the road. There are few cars moving. An occasional ATV potters along the shoulder or brazens it out on the pavement. It is not the sort of community with work for many people. The cars that belong to the houses are away at jobs somewhere else. Gerry tries to imagine a commute across the barrens every morning at dawn. It seems surreally daunting, like a razor-edged steel butterfly.

Gerry decides he's hungry and pulls up at a corner store with a padlocked gas pump in front. Inside, the place is a shrine to failing small-retail. Half dozens of this and that stand in sparse, nervous groups at the front of deep shelves that were built to hold sacks of flour, cases of canned goods, toys and rubber boots and rope. A push-button cappuccino machine with a sign proclaiming the name of the supplier sits next to a couple of half-picked-over cards of last season's trout flies.

Extract from the Analects of Adamson, Gerry thinks. The sage does not buy a cappuccino in a place that sells bait.

The woman behind the counter looks like a too-clean polyester bathroom decoration and has a mouth pinched from saying no to credit. She just manages a watery smile as Gerry selects from her sorry stock of snacks. Vienna sausages in the can, Doritos closing on their sell-by date and bottled juice, ditto, are as good as it gets. Gerry pays and they exchange small talk about the weather and lack of snow. An overloud bell on a spring announces that he's escaping out the door, another cash customer headed out of town.

Some way up the road, Gerry parks at a provincial picnic ground by the ocean to eat his junk-food lunch. He hooks the centre sausage out of the tin with the small blade of his Swiss army knife and thinks about the woman in the store, resenting him for being there, for buying a piece of her shrinking empire, for disturbing her contemplation of an impeccably tidy ruin.

Declining ambition makes you just as mean as big ambition, he thinks. How mean am I?

Mid-afternoon shadows are getting longer when Gerry noses the Honda along the back road into the community where he keeps his boat. A few minutes before, he'd sat at a crossroad and tried to decide where he was going. A part of him plumped for a heedless run west, nights in motels, maybe even onto the ferry and on to God-knows-where. Sensitive waitresses would take pity on the nomad for the night and ride beside him vicariously as he drove off in the morning.

“Yeah, right,” Gerry had said aloud. Did he really need more field notes to add to the gym bag or paper riding behind him? He pulled
across the Trans Canada on the overpass and headed for the smallest piece of his world.

Gerry pulls into his hibernating yacht club and parks. He walks around the tall shapes of cradled boats and down along the docks. The marina and boatyard are relatively free of snow. The thaw and rain at Christmas and the presence of the sea have kept it to gritty drifts on the shady side of cradles. Out in the basin, away from the current of the river, there's a skin of new ice. One fat grey seal lies on it in the middle of the little harbour, a grey-mottled sausage with a self-indulgent cartoon-dog face. It reclines on one side, flippers clear of the ice, conserving heat. Gerry decides it's an old seal, withdrawn from seal society. He supposes the sea trout in the river have attracted it.

“Just you and me, buddy,” Gerry says to the seal. “Two fat old patriarchs, tired of our herds.” The seal doesn't pay him much attention. It seems it's only a coincidence of ice drift that the sharp end with eyes, nose and whiskers points towards him, like the bottle in spin-the-bottle. In the trees behind the clubhouse, crows shout. Gerry meanders back along the docks to his boat in the yard.

Long ago, Gerry started making a point of always leaving all the boat's various keys in the Honda's virginal ashtray. He'd been caught too often, remembering that keys are on the hook by the fridge at home just when he tops the hill that leads down to the marina. Now he takes one and unlocks the padlocked chain that holds a homemade ladder to his cradle. He props it against the hull and scrambles up to inspect the cockpit. There's a thick loaf of hardened snow between the seats. Leaves have slowed the cockpit drains, and ice has built up on the cockpit sole. It's preserved the snowdrift on top of it. Gerry climbs over the life-lines and stands on the seat to uncleat one end of the blue plastic tarp he secures over the leaky sliding hatch in winter. Then he climbs down. He rummages another key out of the Honda's ashtray and goes and unlocks the clubhouse. In a storage room he finds a snow shovel and carries it back to the boat. Then he collects a tool box from the back of his car. The fact that it's there is not good planning on his part. It's been riding there, rattling since October when the boat came out of the water.

“The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action,” Gerry says to the empty boatyard. He climbs back aboard with the tools and
shovel. Five or six shovelfuls and some determined chopping clears the little cockpit of snow and ice. Then he unscrews the winter plywood he keeps over the hatch splash boards.

Who says being a slob doesn't pay off? Gerry thinks as he lets himself into the boat. He'd meant to take the cushions off some nice day in November, but then his mother had her fall and he'd gone to Ottawa. When he came back, nice days seemed to get scarce and then it was Christmas. He'd come out on a sleety Sunday when it was too wet to put cushions on the roof rack. He'd just screwed the plywood on for security and left the cushions aboard.