Rockets Versus Gravity

This book is for Bluebell

(For Evermore)

Cause

(Prologue)

Rocks and Rockets

Trajectory

The Final Ring

Blink

The Code

YYZ55

Declination

Moving Is Easier than Renovating

Inconvenience

Property of Riskey and Gamble

Maple Leaf Sermon

Impact

The Receptionist

Royal Blood

Half-Life

You Deserve Better! You Deserve More!

Escape Velocity

Sangria Red and Ocean Blue

The Toes of One Foot

James Yeo Is Going Away

Coronation

Effect

(Epilogue)

Storm

Notes

Acknowledgements

Gratitude

Synchronicity

syn·chro·nic·i·ty

sIŋkrǝˈnIsIti

The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Chaos Theory

cha·os theory

ˈkei
s ˈθɪǝ.ri

The branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.

(Prologue)

T
he flutter of a butterfly's wing.

The typhoon halfway around the world.

You linger in her doorway. Your molecules mingle.

In the sky outside, the vapour condenses.

(The sensitive dependence on initial conditions.)

If you gently brush that raindrop from her cheek, the slight cool wetness will amplify and warm, until she beckons you into her perfumed inner sanctum, where you will kneel to anoint her fragile, sacred orchid.

Then, these enraged men will lower their stones. Others will pull their fingers away from the buttons that launch the rockets.

They will hang their heads in shame and think again.

And the rockets that fly instead will escape the tyranny of gravity, will float free in space, will explore new worlds.

But, if you try to take her from behind right here in the hallway, then tomorrow the stones will pummel the earth, and the rockets will fall from the sky.

So, do what you will.

Trajectory

tra-jec-to-ry

trǝˈdƷektǝri

1. The path that a moving object (as a rocket) follows through space.

2. A chosen or taken course.

S
tan is sensitive to screaming. It is almost like an allergic reaction. When Sheila has a tantrum, it feels like rusty nails being driven through his temples, like crackling high-voltage wires pulling tighter and tighter around his heart.

Yet Stan's tolerance for physical pain is superheroically high.

When that axe glanced off a rock-hard knot that he couldn't see, and the rebound shattered his left knee, Stan drove himself in his pickup truck down the cratered logging road to the medical centre. He sang along to the scratchy AM radio the whole way.
“Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, Lavender's green, When I am king, dilly dilly, You shall be queen.”

When Bobby'd had a few more swigs from the flask than usual and cleaved off two of Stan's toes with the splitting awl, Stan didn't even take his boot off to look. To save Bobby's ass, he finished the last half hour of his shift without slowing down. He didn't even fill out an accident report.

So physical pain is no problem for Stan. The other guys on the crew call him the Man of Steel.

But whenever Sheila shrieks, he cringes as if he's being seared with a cattle brand.

“
Gawd-dammit
, Stan!
Gawwwwwd-DAMMIT
!”
Her wail is scarcely muted by the cellphone's tiny speaker.
“Not again! How could you be so irresponsible? Are you a man or a child?
Gawwwwwd-DAMMIT
, Stan!”

The inside of the simple silver band was engraved with the words
Forever More.
Stan was pretty sure that the correct wording would have been
For Evermore,
but Sheila had insisted that her way was the correct way.

Sheila's way would
always
be the correct way. Forever More.

T
he first time he lost his wedding ring was on their honeymoon.

It was April 12, the same date that Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space back in 1961. Stan had a model of Gagarin's Vostok 1 rocket, along with several other spacecraft, displayed atop the coffee table in his one-bedroom bungalow. Stan had been fascinated by space travel since he was a little kid, but guys who flunk out in grade six don't get to be to be astronauts.

On this particular April 12, Stan was sunburned, drunk, and feeling generally numb when the first ring slipped from his finger and into the blood-warm salt water. He watched it spiral downward, disappearing into the crevasses below.

He almost drowned diving for it. The salt water stung his eyes. The chemical burns from frantically groping the fire coral seared his hands. But none of these things were anything compared to the way that Stan burned and stung and choked for breath after Sheila got finished with him in the hotel room that night.

As punishment for his irresponsibility, the side trip they had planned to Cape Canaveral was cancelled, and Stan's model rockets were tossed in the trash bin by Sheila on the day she crossed the bungalow's threshold, to be replaced by her collection of Marilyn Monroe dolls.

Early the next morning, before Sheila woke from her snoring slumber and before the garbage truck began making its rounds, Stan tiptoed outside to rescue the rockets. He hid them alongside the axes and awls and pry bars and chains inside the tool box in the back of his pickup truck. Sheila would never think to look in there.

Stan wasn't quite ready to let his rockets go.

S
tan lost the second ring in a poker game.

He'd had his reservations about going with Bobby to that strip club in the city. Although the place had a classy, French-sounding name (the Ooh La La All-Nude Gentlemen's Club), it didn't have a great reputation.

The last time Stan went there, his wallet was stolen, adding insult to injury after paying twelve bucks a glass for watered-down beer and a steep cover charge to watch a raccoon-eyed single mom lumber around on stage, obviously thinking about the diapers and dishes waiting for her at home. But it had been ages since he and Sheila had been intimate, and Stan longed to see and maybe even feel some female flesh, even if he knew that the half-hearted winks and come-ons were only preludes to financial transactions.

When Bobby disappeared into one of the back rooms for a private dance, a tough-looking customer sat down at Stan's table. He wore a blue Toronto Maple Leafs jersey with the name
SPRINGTHORPE
spelled across the back in white iron-on letters.

“Wanna play some cards?” this gentleman asked.

“Sure,” Stan said, without thinking much about it.

After three hands, Stan didn't have enough cash left to pay for his twelve-dollar beer, so the slick sunnuvabitch took Stan's ring instead.

Stan removed all of the model rockets from inside the toolbox in the back of his pickup truck, and he exchanged them at the local pawnshop for enough cash to replace the ring before Sheila ever noticed that it was missing. At the last minute, he decided to keep the replica of the Saturn V that carried the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon, and he still received enough money to pay the local jeweller.

It was a bittersweet victory for Stan.

S
tan lost the third ring while wrestling with a logjam in the flume.

He hadn't had time to pull on his gauntlet gloves or even to grab a pry bar, and as he grappled with the log that had turned sideways and caused the blockage, his fingers got caught between its scaly bark and the rough-sawn head of another log. He pulled as if his life depended on it (because it did), and in the end he managed to keep all of his fingers. In exchange, he gave up some knuckle skin, some blood, and his replacement wedding ring.

By the time Sheila was finished with him that night, Stan almost wished he'd gone down with the rumbling stampede of logs. She banished him from the house, pulled down the blinds, and locked the doors.

He curled up inside the cab of his truck, but he couldn't sleep for the ringing in his ears. He switched on the radio, and the voice inside the speaker informed him that “Today in history, January 28, 1986, all seven crew members of the NASA space shuttle
Challenger
were killed when the spacecraft broke apart seventy-three seconds into its flight.”

Stan cried for the rest of the night.

A
nd now Stan's ears are ringing again as Sheila screams at him through the cellphone speaker,
“
Gawd-dammit
, Stan!
Gawwwwwd-fucking
-DAMMIT
! That's THREE FUCKING RINGS! How could you lose THREE FUCKING WEDDING RINGS?”

It is actually
four
rings, but Stan isn't about to correct Sheila. When she pauses to refill her lungs, Stan simply says, “I won't need a replacement.”

“And just what the hell do you mean by THAT?”

The forest floor is cool against Stan's neck. His back is cushioned by the fallen leaves. Above him, branches reach up like skeletal fingertips into the lavender-blue sky.

The chainsaw smells like burnt oil; its engine sputters on the ground beside him, finally stalling.

The spatters on the trees blink faintly in the day's dying light. The shimmer on the dark pool of blood turns matte as it is sucked down into the dark forest soil.

In his soft but rumbling voice, Stan finally says, “I also lost the hand the ring was attached to, Sheila.”

With the hand that is still attached to his body, the last thing that Stan does in his life is switch off the phone.

And then there is silence.

Sweet, sweet, beautiful silence.

And there are stars.

For evermore.