The Life of Hope (3 page)

I wanted to flee, but somehow I found the courage to tell him, “I need a Hoper.”

Edgar stared at me for several long moments. He appeared to process the information slowly, reflecting on each of my words. Then he reached down below the counter and produced the item in question.

A Hoper is about the size of a small finger, and a finger is what it looks like, to a certain degree. It’s carved out of wood and jointed twice where the knuckles would be. At the tip there is a large treble hook. This Hoper was painted a fleshy pink, spotted by big drops of red. It seemed as unlikely a lure as I could imagine, but Harv swore by the thing, so I asked, “How much?”

Edgar thought about that for a while and then said, somewhat arbitrarily, “Four bucks.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, “that’s a little dear.”

Edgar stared at me.

If I had my life to live over, I thought, I would say “expensive.” Never mind about screwing up my marriage to Elspeth, never mind about all the rotten things I’ve done to my friends
and loved ones, just let me live my life over, and all I’ll change is I won’t say to Edgar, “That’s a little dear.”

Edgar said, finally, “The wife says that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The wife says things are ‘a little dear.’ ” Edgar crossed his arms and placed his elbows on the counter. “So get this,” he said. “Last summer, we go visit her brother, ’s got a cottage up north near Sudbury. So we stop at one of those places along the highway, y’know, a restaurant like, to get something to eat. And the place is full of all sorts of
gift
shit. I swear, I don’t know what those people are thinking. I mean, after driving a couple of hours, I want a burger and a coffee. I do not want to buy a Ookpik, or a piece of wood with the Lord’s Prayer burned into it, or a placemat with a fucking Mountie on it, or nothing. I want a burger and a coffee. Anyways, see, they got these china animals in this place, little bunnies and stuff. And they got this china Bambi, right? Yea big.” Edgar spaced off three or four inches between his massive thumb and forefinger. “Frigging thing costs eight bucks. So I take this thing, this Bambi, over to the wife. Okay? And I says, ‘Hey, hon, you want to buy this Bambi? It costs eight bucks.’ ”

Edgar started to chuckle.

“Ha!” I realized what the point was and started chuckling myself.

Edgar looked suddenly crestfallen. “The dumb twat bought it.” He shook his head, world weary. “Didn’t say a word.” Edgar tried to forget about it. He dangled the odd lure in the air and demanded, “You want to buy the Hoper?”

“Does it work?”

Edgar answered, “So the story goes.”

Not only did I purchase a Hoper, I also picked up a copy of Gregory Opdycke’s tome,
Fishing for Ol’ Mossback
. Edgar had told me all about this legendary Mossback in the half-hour or so I’d spent chatting (axe-murderers are people, too). Ol’ Mossback, according to local myth, is the premier denizen of Lookout Lake. Edgar told me that there are various schools of thought concerning Ol’ Mossback’s species. The most popular has it that he is a muskellunge, and this seems probable given his length, conservatively estimated at five and a half feet. Others think he is a mutant pike, and this notion appeals for its supernatural aspects, supernatural in the most literal sense, Ol’ Mossback having arrogantly overstepped Mother Nature’s bounds. There’s a few, Edgar confided, who think Ol’ Mossback is some sort of walleye pickerel. These are usually people who claim to have seen the beast, for they report that he has the strange metallic eyes of that breed, large and round, with a luminous aspect like those of a blind Buddhist monk.

Whatever he is, Ol’ Mossback is reported to be a monster, his body covered with scars, a record of his battles with mankind. He is adorned with fishhooks like jewelry. If anyone ever managed to land Ol’ Mossback (no one ever has, Edgar was quick to point out) the collection of terminal tackle stuck to the fish would supply one with the history of sport angling in North America; Ol’ Mossback is at least two hundred years old.

At this point in the tale I advised Edgar, “Get real.”

Edgar shrugged, but I could tell he was wounded in some small way.

“You don’t gotta believe me if you don’t wanna,” he muttered, and then Edgar went to an antique cash register and methodically rang in my purchases.

So there I stood on Joseph Avenue in downtown Hope, on a
very hot summer’s day. I decided that what I needed to do was find a place to sit down and look at my new stuff. A bar, I thought, would do nicely.

The closest bar was called Duffy’s. It was also the nicest looking of the three town taverns. It appeared to occupy the bottom level of an old hotel, and the hotel was whitewashed and ornate with pillars, cornices and curlicues. The windows to Duffy’s were thick and stippled, but signs with fat, cartoony letters spelled out what you would find inside. BEER, one announced, and a drawing underneath showed how the beer came in big, frothy pitchers, and jagged lines all around it showed how it was icy cold. A larger sign read PINBALL, odd in this age of video. By far the largest sign read EXOTIC DANCERS. I decided I’d try Duffy’s. I was so taken with the notion of exotic dancers that I failed to notice the number of motorcycles that were lined up out front.

Before I go any further, I should make some mention of my appearance. I spent my childhood and adolescence as a fat and bespectacled lad, but during my twenties I’d started running and lifting weights in a frantic attempt to reverse the ravages of my life-style, so my thirtieth year found me with something vaguely resembling an athletic build. Sheer vanity had convinced me to abandon my spectacles for contact lenses, although they cost me a fortune because I lose them all the time. I now sport a beard, because I hate shaving, and I have long hair, because I can never be bothered to get it cut.

I was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and cowboy boots, which seemed somehow suitable attire, also a get-up of which Elspeth would never approve. (“Who are
you
supposed to be?” Elspeth would ask.) I was, furthermore, covered in dust from my moped journey, and my protective helmet was nestled in the crook of my arm.

So when I entered Duffy’s and found myself in the midst of a sizable collection of bikers, no one paid any particular attention to me. Still, I wasn’t so big a fool as to hang around. I turned, took a step, but someone grabbed my arm. A voice said, “Hiya, bud!”

The fellow who owned this voice, and was also grabbing my arm, sat at a tiny, round table. He was a fairly handsome young man, except that the skin around his eyes was prematurely
wrinkled, and his teeth were bad, horrible in fact, two rows of misshapen, yellow stumps. “Have a sit-down, bud, and I’ll buy you some beers!”

Another thing you have to know about me is I’m usually near broke. The rest of the time I’m broke. “Oh. Thanks.” I tossed my helmet on the table (his was there already, one with a black visor, licks of flame painted on it) and sat down.

This fellow’s T-shirt read
Fuck You
. I tried to determine if I was missing something (these T-shirts usually make some attempt to be clever), but all it said was
Fuck You
.

The man reached forward and grabbed my knee, squeezing it hard. Then he lifted his other hand as if to slap me, but he kept it suspended in mid-air. After a long moment I realized that he wanted to give me a “high five,” so I lifted my hand and we slapped palms. Then he grabbed my hand, and we shook in that reversed manner. The guy said, “Geez, it’s good to see ya, bud.”

The waitress came over. The waitress was a plump, blonde girl with a red rose tattooed on her shoulder. She said “Hi,” in a friendly fashion and then pointed a finger at me. “Three draft, a salt shaker and a pickled egg, right?”

I said, “Sounds reasonable” (even though the pickled egg didn’t, particularly), and they both laughed.

As soon as the waitress left, my companion grabbed my knee again. His knuckles read L-O-V-E in fading purple ink. “So what you doin’, bud? I thought you lived in T.O.”

I know I’m going to seem a bit conceited here, but my first thought was that this guy knew who I was. My novel had been reviewed in most Canadian newspapers, usually accompanied by my photograph. I’d also done a number of television interviews and been on a game show. (Really, I was. It was a low-budget thing called “That’s A Sport,” and I’d distinguished myself by knowing absolutely nothing.) So I answered this fellow by saying, “Thought I’d do a little fishing,” and showed him my Hoper and Mossback manual.

“Just keep your dick in your pants,” the guy advised.

“I, um, intend to.”

My companion laughed, and I wondered why I apparently kept making jokes.

“What,” asked this guy, “did the old lady shoot you the boots?”

This lucky guess I attributed to my generally looking hard done by. “You got it,” I nodded.

“Oh, bud,” this fellow said, smiling and shaking his head. “Still fucking around, eh?”

It was only then that I noticed the capital B. Bud was my name.

Confirming this, the waitress set down three glasses of draft beer, a salt shaker and a pickled egg with a cheerful, “Here you go, Bud.”

I reached for some money, but the guy waved his hand at me. (The other hand, the knuckles reading H-A-T-E.) “I got it, Bud. I just want to see you do it.”

Oh-oh
, I thought. I drained some beer into my mouth rapidly.

The waitress lingered by the table. She wanted to see me do it, too.

“Do it, do it,” urged my companion.

“First thing in the afternoon?” I bluffed.

“That’s
why
you do it,” the guy said. “First thing, so that all your daily nutritional needs are taken care of.”

“Eat the pickled egg, you mean?”

This was another of my big jokes. The guy exploded with mirth. “ ‘Eat the pickled egg’ the guy says. Did you hear him, Rose? ‘Eat the pickled egg!’ ” Then he turned slightly more serious. “Quit fucking around, Bud. Do it.”

“It’s been a while,” I said. “Remind me.”

“What, have you been doing heavy-duty dope or what?” He was getting annoyed with me. “Fucking put salt on the egg, fucking drop it into the brew, and fucking chug the whole fucking thing!”

“Oh, that!” Bud was some strange goomba. Still, it hardly seemed like an impossible feat. I picked up the salt-shaker with flourish and gave the egg a dosing. I could tell when I’d salted it enough by looking at my companion’s face. When the egg was liberally covered he gave a little nod. I plopped the egg into the beer. There was a fair amount of fizzing. Then I raised the draft glass, said “Cheers,” and knocked it back.

The actual beer went down easily enough while the egg bounced against my teeth. When it was gone I opened my mouth wide and the pickled egg tumbled in. After a few seconds it joined the beer in my belly.

I thought I’d done wonderfully well, but my friend looked outraged. “You chewed,” he muttered, deeply betrayed.

“Bud doesn’t chew?”

He cocked his head, bewildered.

“Bud doesn’t
chew
,” I repeated evenly. “I was just shifting it around in my mouth so I could swallow it better.”

After a few moments the guy nodded, but he looked far from convinced. The waitress left with a quiet tsking of her tongue. I threw back the remaining beer and stood up. “See you around.”

The fellow nodded, unwilling to look me in the eye. “Sure, Bud. Anything you say.”

I got the hell out of there.

The next establishment was two or three storefronts down the street. It was called Moe’s Steakhouse and Tavern. Not my favorite sort of place, just your basic restaurant that happens to serve booze as well. The tables, seen through the large front windows, were made from plastic and lined out in a neat, orderly fashion. Moe’s place was nearly empty, the clientele being an old man seated at the formica counter drinking coffee, and two young girls at a table near the back smoking cigarettes and eating home-fries. Still, I decided to try Moe’s. For one thing, “Moe” is a name you can do business with, especially business of an alcoholic nature. I could imagine myself wandering in on a daily basis and saying, “Hey, Moe, what do you know?” “The regular, Moe!” “How about them Blue Jays, eh, Moe?” The other thing was, a stenciled sign informed me that a bottle of beer would cost ninety cents. A buck a beer (“Keep the dime, Moe!”), I could easily accommodate, even within my rather limited budget. So into Moe’s I went.

The place seemed to be run by an enormous woman, a woman that could easily have been Edgar the axe-murderer’s twin. She was standing behind the counter reading a paperback that had something to do with nurses. She glanced up and watched as I seated myself a couple of stools down from the old man, then she fished out a ballpoint pen that she’d held trapped in her cleavage. This monstrous woman (not Moe, I saw, because “Sophie” was stitched on to her white uniform) snatched up an order pad and poised the pen above it. “Yo?”

“A beer, please. An Export.”

The young girls giggled over their potatoes.

I took out my Hoper for further inspection. I chuckled in a bemused way, for no reason, other than it seemed like the sort of thing Red Fisher might do while looking at a Hoper. Meanwhile the enormous woman walked to a glass cabinet that contained a few bottles of beer beside pies and dishes of rice pudding. She slid the door along and took out a beer, opening it with a churchkey she’d also taken out of her bosom. I began to wonder what-all she had down there.

She brought the beer to me and then once more made ready to write on her order pad. “How do you want it done?” she asked.

“Beg your pardon?”

“How do you want it done?” she enunciated more clearly.

I asked, “How do I want what done?” thinking that if it came to that I wanted to be on top.

“Your steak,” she responded.

“I don’t want my steak done at all,” I told her, and then, hearing how it sounded, I said, “I didn’t ask for a steak.”