Order of Good Cheer (6 page)

But thoughts of his son didn't kidnap Drew tonight. Looking drunker than he had coming in, he counted on his fingers. “She has a grown-up kid. She had this whole career. She's had
cancer
. She's had this whole life. It's totally different now.”

“Well exactly. And I'm no Johnny Depp, so I've got to be buff at least.”

Drew looked away shaking his head, but on the verge of smiling.

Andy tapped an incisor. “I'm thinking the gold teeth too. Kohling my eyes.”

Here Drew shifted, accepted the inevitable, decided to help. “Okay, seriously? Lose the hair, okay?” He scuffed his knuckles over his cheek.

“My beard? Really?”

“It's not a ‘beard.' Remember Yasser Arafat? Remember those individual hairs he had coming out of his face? She won't be impressed.”

Laura arrived in exactly a month, after first spending Christmas with her daughter, who was a freshman at university. Amelia, seventeen.

Andy decided to give the beard a few more weeks, see if it filled out any.

Worthington delivered the ribs himself. The waitress — it was one of Helen and Steve Peters' kids — followed behind him bearing Andy's poutine. Worthington set down a plate holding what appeared to be a full rack of spareribs. To one side, a dome of potato salad balanced a sprig of parsley. To another, a finger bowl of hot water floated a lemon wedge.

Drew snorted and held his hands out over the platter, a gesture of helpless complaint.

“I wanted a
rib
. A taste. A sample.”

“Our compliments, sir.” Worthington brought his heels together and did a slight bow. “We hope you'll choose the Hickory Pit.” It was hard to tell if the manager wasn't now duping back.

In any case the ribs were awful. Upon realizing this Drew peered up from the soggy pile, lips smeared with sweet grease. He looked embarrassed and sad for the place, and for his prank, when he mouthed, “These
really
suck.” Andy ate his poutine and tried to help with the ribs, which swam in far too much sauce and were chewy to boot, and maybe even a bit off, though steeped in so much vinegar it was hard to tell. They each ordered a pint to wash things down, and also to drop some money in this teetering place, which was empty when they'd arrived and still empty when they left, and the feeling upon leaving after eating free food was that they'd lifted change out of a beggar's hat.

NEXT DAY, ANDY
got home from work at three and deliberately showered without his clothes on, though they were caked and beige with grain dust. It was odd at first how much the spray stung. He felt like he was an apple with no peel. Also he hadn't slept well again.

There was enough time before ordering his Wednesday pizza to settle in his easy chair beside the living-room window and
finish the Nijinsky biography. It was more of a skim really. Laura's career had led him to this subject and he wanted to bone up, as it were. He'd chosen this chair half hoping he'd drift into a nap, but though the writing was bad the subject was so quirky he found himself flipping pages hunting the nuggets. What a story, what a life. Nijinsky, irrefutable creative genius, the social graces of a turnip farmer. Confused sexuality, an impresario sugar daddy, the fall of Czarist Russia, and, finally, insane asylums. Nijinsky's thighs were so thick and he could leap so high that he was thought superhuman. Audiences swore that he actually transformed into his various characters. He took to leaving the stage with a leap, disappearing into the wings at the height of his jump so that no one saw him come down, leaving the impression that he didn't. Barely able to make himself understood with words, he found sanctuary in a haughty muteness. His nickname was God of the Dance. Within a year of the height of his fame he'd be catatonic, masturbating in public and shouting in German, a language he didn't know. Andy recalled, in
Lolita
, Nabokov referring to Nijinsky as having giant thighs and too many feathers.

Andy closed his book and swivelled his chair to note the sunset breaking through and a wind coming up. In the outer harbour a scatter of fish boats punched home through some chop. (Were they out fishing already? Or hunting the tide line for more damage?) Over on Ridley Island, from the clutch of houses in Dodge Cove the wood-fire smoke rose to clear the wall of trees, then blew horizontal. But there on the horizon was some orange, some rare sunset.

It was Wednesday, tonight his weekly visit at his mother's, so he put on his one pair of dress pants, black. He had two white dress shirts, but with those pants he'd look like a waiter. The red golf shirt made him look like a waiter from some place like last
night's Hickory Pit, while the dark blue golf shirt made him look like a bruise. He hated his closet. It felt not just sparse but seedy. Again there was the “what would Laura think” question, but his closet's crummy contents also asked why his social life had become so meagre. He had lots of work clothes — jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts — and these had also become his everyday clothes. The “dress” clothes were basically old concoctions geared to satisfy his mother and the three ladies she lived with. But wardrobe demands were suddenly pressing. Not just Laura. First was next week's banquet with the Chinese Wheat People, which is what people had taken to calling them.

A shopping spree was in order, and to someplace other than Work Wearhouse. Andy felt a bit shaky imagining himself fingering fabrics and lapels. The quest was for “casual elegance” probably, but it was possible to buy something ten years out of style. On top of this was a new notion that at thirty-nine he was maybe no longer socially
allowed
to wear certain fashions, for instance whatever kind of strategic grubbiness the twenty-year-olds were wearing these days.

Andy wondered how weird it would be, and how much torture would be forthcoming from Drew, if he were to borrow Pauline to take as a guide on his shopping trip. Probably not weird at all, Andy's hopelessness with clothes being no secret. Didn't own an ironing board, smiled incomprehension at any talk of twill or raw silk. Compared to him, even Drew was a metrosexual. He'd understand.

Drew hadn't visited him up on the annex this morning, nor was he in the lunchroom, and when Andy checked the duty board he saw Drew hadn't made it in to work. He wondered if maybe he'd gone home last night and washed down those ribs with a few more. It was a problem. It actually was.

He wouldn't call over there just yet. If Drew was hungover it meant Pauline was icy and neither one a joy to talk to. Not even Andy proposing a guided shopping spree — Pauline as Sherpa for his handicapped attempt at the summit of middle-aged fashion — would raise a smile in that house.

DESPITE THE RAIN
, Andy chose to walk the mile across town to his mother's. He strode quickly, intending violence to the pizza he'd just wolfed. Feeling his thighs clench with each stride he thought of Nijinsky's withering last years. To his left, though he couldn't see it, was Mount Hays, its top dusted with November snow. To his right, beyond the houses and streetlights, the dark harbour. On the breeze he could smell the ebbing tide mixed, he thought, with those fish. From several streets over, some music boomed faintly, you could tell it was all muddy on cheap speakers, and it took Andy a moment to recognize it as opera and that, since this wasn't what you'd crank at a party, something must be out of control, some loner on a binge.

On 2nd Street he passed Drew's father's pretentious place, with its fake portico supported by fake half-pillars, bought in a fit of self-congratulation during the real estate spike a decade ago. Andy never did like the similarity he shared with Mr. Madden, that of a single man occupying an entire house. In Mr. Madden's case, a near-mansion. Where next week's dinner — “banquet,” Mr. Madden's word — was taking place.

Andy realized that this dinner might have been where Drew got his “out-of-town convention” last night during the rib charade. There would be maybe thirty people coming, with the mayors of Prince Rupert and Kitimat, and assorted business leaders, including the director of the grain terminal,
so stratospheric a boss that Andy had never met him. In other words, all the town mucky-mucks, and all for the purpose of wooing the Chinese Wheat People. Nobody seemed to know who they were. They were representatives of government or of free enterprise. They were in town to scout, or negotiate, or finalize millions, billions, or trillions worth of grain and possibly even coal trade. The Chinese Wheat People had arrived last week and were lodged in modest rooms at The Crest. Adding to the mystery, erasing some rumours while creating others, the Chinese Wheat People turned out to be two women. (Drew had said of this, “How Soviet of them.” He predicted that one would be carrying “an old carbine” and the other a hoe, and both would have shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal “state biceps.”) Mr. Madden, who went with others on the Chamber of Commerce to greet them at the airport, claimed that these two women looked no more than twenty years old. He'd been announcing this outrageous fact non-stop, always followed innocently by, “But, you know, you can't really tell.”

Mr. Madden had invited Andy via Drew, who said, “He says you have to come.”

“Why?”

“They need a token worker. Communists expect that.”

“You're a worker.”

“No, I'm not.” This meant that he was the host's son and didn't count. It also meant, without him saying it, that his father was still getting Drew, as much as he was able, to attend advantageous events in the hope that he would someday choose something other than the grain terminal.

“He wants me to come?” Andy asked. Though he knew. And over the past weeks, it seemed almost subconsciously, he'd picked up books on both the historical and the current Great Leap Forward, as well as one on Cantonese cuisine. It had glossy
colour plates, and he'd been surprised by how many dishes looked like what you'd get at several of the Chinese joints in Prince Rupert.

In any case, he knew why he was being invited.

Especially at work, Andy Winslow was regarded as a polymath. He was enough of a polymath to know he wasn't one. More exactly, he was a reader and a repository of information.

At work he had become used to intercom calls whose only purpose was a question such as, “There's five kinds of Pacific salmon, right? And dog's another word for chum?” or “
How
much did they pay Russia for Alaska?” or “Pakistan doesn't have nukes, do they?” Maybe his answers won an argument for someone, or oiled a stuck conversation. Sometimes he'd field a question he took more pride in, for instance from a recently hired supervisor, “On those old belts, how long before a fray is a break?” A few years back, on graveyard shift, there'd been a game when packs of guys called and tested him. He heard money had changed hands.

In any case, twenty years ago, sitting his first-ever shift, alone in the tin shack atop eight massive cylindrical bins, Andy's single responsibility was to listen for the phone to ring, then punch several buttons in the right sequence, which tripped one conveyor belt over to another, flax to canola, barley to one-red-thirteen. This might happen four times over the eight hours, sometimes never. With so much downtime, he could listen to the radio, pace, or go crazy. Officially, on downtime everyone was supposed to sweep grain dust, which was ultra-flammable and everywhere. But grain dust was so fine that it was like a layer of vaguely heavy air, it merely floated up to hang awhile when a broom moved near it, and foremen seemed content if you kept your push broom propped on a wall, looking recently used.

Or he could read. Andy had always read, but he started to
read
. It ate up the time, and then it became more than that. Here
he was getting paid top wage — the union was strong in those days — to just sit there. All that wasted time left him feeling not only restless, but hollow. Added up, all those empty hours were a wasted life. Magazines and crossword puzzles didn't assuage the guilt or fill the void, but books did. And so, not many weeks into his long career as casual labour in the Prince Rupert Grain Terminal, Andy decided he was getting paid to learn.

At first he didn't like getting caught reading. For some odd reason it had to do with being tall. Tall men didn't read, tall men with a book looked somehow desperate. Or hunched, or humbled, or stooped. You thought of Ichabod Crane clutching his book and striding awkwardly through a field. Six-feet-even would have been fine.

But Andy got over that and the librarians came to know him as the guy who twice weekly clomped in in workboots, late for afternoon shift and hunting books. His selections, odd for a man in this town, became somewhat known — first the Jane Austen binge, then Dickens, then the Russians, and then on into some contemporaries. Fiction fell off, and next the librarians could track his forays into geography, and biology, and psychology (clinical, pseudo, and New Age, in turn). Travel books Andy sprinkled in like vacations. He came to love extreme travel, he a vicarious voyeur of a distant culture's freakish ways.

Then the librarians stopped seeing him. The break was clean (and so abrupt that he heard of their concern for his health) and marked when, mere months after they'd begun dating, Andy convinced Regional College English instructor Rachel Hedley to give him a copy of her inter-university library card, a privilege he maintained, along with her friendship, to this day.

Lately, sitting in his hard-backed wooden chair, perched two hundred feet up, forested mountains behind him and an ocean in front, it was history that grabbed him most. History seemed
an extension of extreme travel. He'd read and reread O'Hanlon stumbling in the Amazon, Matthiessen aware in the Himalayas, Goering and Coffey paddling the Ganges — there were dozens of gems. But there was no travel writing so extreme as the old stuff, those explorers who stepped on an unknown beach either to take an arrow in the neck or taste the raw, dripping chunk of some creature held out by a sincerely proud elder. Two a.m. on a winter night, rain thrumming the tin shack, nothing was more savoury than the righteous mutiny, the speared turquoise fish, the tumble with a bare-breasted maiden, all under the dangerously coded approval of villagers who thought in shapes and colours their invaders could only guess at.