When Is a Man (30 page)

In February, three snowmobilers died in the backcountry. There were more than two dozen men in Fiddler's Bowl at the time, a mix of locals and sledders from Revelstoke, Kelowna, and Calgary. They'd spent the day high-marking, gunning their sleds up a steep slope, cresting the hill and racing back down. When the last rider dropped in, the slope above him broke in a perfect slab, loud as a thunderclap. The avalanche gained momentum, turned into a white cloud, house-sized chunks of snow that snapped trees in half. Seven riders were hit by debris, thrown from their sleds and then buried. The four buried at the fringes of the avalanche were quickly dug out. The other bodies were recovered two days later by the Search and Rescue team.

The tragedy became fodder for the coffee shops and pubs. But the town had seen this before: people died every winter in their mountains. They were not shocked, though people used the word. Paul would have described it as a deep, communal uneasiness, as though the avalanche had swept past Shellycoat itself and only missed by inches. The deaths even put a chill into Jory and his crew. They scoffed and cracked dark jokes but quietly swore off the backcountry until the snow profile changed. At the same time, a cold snap arrived and the ski resort's slopes turned icy and unpleasant. The season looked set to end on a dismal note, and Jory took to working longer shifts at the shop and then partying all night.

One morning, Paul intercepted him on the porch and invited him in for a coffee. At the kitchen table, Jory held up a bruised hand and turned his head to show a cut near the temple. “Banned for two weeks from the bar,” he said. He confessed to growing some pot upstairs, using lights in their bedroom closet. “Don't worry, it won't get you in trouble,” he said quickly. “It's no big deal.” He wanted to give Sonya hours at the store just so he could keep an eye on her, he said. She was acting different, and he didn't trust these mood swings of hers. Jory glanced upward at the sound of footsteps above them and rubbed his temples. “Shit's not so good right now.”

Paul considered how difficult it was to maintain the balance between the domestic life and the life of risk. Relationships complicated your identity, nullifying and remoulding. The narcissism of risk, on the other hand, was so pleasantly streamlined: every time you conquered the impossible, you became more yourself than you were before.

Late one afternoon, another fight upstairs. When Jory shouted, his voice had heft and musculature, and when he pleaded and begged, it broke into high-pitched fragments of sound. In everything he did, Jory wobbled between boy and man.

“You're always talking to the same guy—ten people in the room but always the same fucking guy.”

“Maybe it's because he's your only friend who doesn't talk to me like I'm your brainless little snowboard bunny.”

“Yeah, well, I'll pound that so-called friend of mine if he keeps that shit up.”

This time Paul hadn't wanted to eavesdrop. He retreated to his bedroom, where their argument was reduced to a muffled din. After that, he rarely went upstairs to visit. He decided to transcribe his interview with Hardy himself and had no other work for Sonya. He abandoned her to the bleak winter.

Gina answered Elsie's phone, as he'd hoped. Her mother's flu was still pretty bad, and Gina didn't want to leave the house. The television blared in the background, the unmistakable swelling strings and wooden dialogue of daytime soaps. The noise faded as she walked the phone into the kitchen.

“I've been running the puke bowl all day,” she said in a strained voice. “And in between that, she complains.”

“About you?”

“About everything.”

“Need me to pick up Shane?”

“That's all right.”

“Seriously. I could bring him back here.”

“Better if he's here.”

He swung by Elsie's anyway and convinced Gina to lend him the car seat. Stubborn. Maybe she was wary of him trying too hard to be the surrogate father. He'd honestly never considered it until now, but being with a single mother might be his only real shot at becoming a dad. Maybe she anticipated being put off by his desperation, unless he'd done that already when he called her ex-husband a murderer. He stopped at the pizza place, bought two mediums. Would this also be considered too eager, an act of bribery?

At the school parking lot, he stood outside and watched the kids throw snowballs at one another. He saw Shane through the crowd of snowsuits and mittens and waved to him. The boy ran over, then hesitated, wondering where his mother was, a little shy. “There's pizza,” Paul told him, and Shane scrambled into the back of the vehicle. He buckled him into his car seat and handed him a slice. “That's using your noodle,” the boy said with the practised air of someone who'd repeated the arcane phrase a hundred times that day.

“Hey.” The voice froze Paul. He closed the door carefully and turned. Billy marched toward him, his ears a bright pink beneath his ball cap. He was hunched over slightly, his jacket collar up.

“He's coming with me,” Billy said.

Paul shivered under his jacket. “It's Gina's night. Until the weekend. That's the agreement.”

“Who the fuck asked you?” Billy took another step forward, and Paul stumbled back against the passenger door. He heard a rubbing sound on the window, and he and Billy stopped to look. Shane, blank-faced, was wiping the fog from the glass, tomato paste smeared in an arc.

Paul said, “You're going to beat me up in front of your son?”

A loud, cowboy's guffaw, a friendly clap on Paul's shoulder calculated to trigger an explosion. He had to bear that without flinching, not give him a reason. Billy squeezed his shoulder again, condescending, trying to set him off. Paul gave him nothing—he was just as tall as Billy, he realized, but probably a hell of a lot weaker.

“I should,” Billy breathed. “Show him how bullshit you are.”

Paul risked a glance back. Shane was looking down at his lap, his mouth and chin buried in his jacket. Billy backed off a step and waggled his fingers at his son and forced a thin smile. He said, “This isn't right. Gina's supposed to be picking him up. What if I hadn't come by and he was left alone?”

“Elsie's sick. I'm helping out.”

Billy stomped his feet in a quick jig of frustration, comical in his shin-high snow boots and tight blue jeans. “Mind your own fucking business. Stay out of everyone's lives.”

“You mean Gina's life, or Hardy's?” Paul, angry enough to dare, pushed himself away from the car.

Billy shook his head slowly, eyebrows raised in astonishment. “You're in real need of a serious ass kicking, bud.”

“Do you wonder what Hardy told me? What he said?”

Parents had stopped dragging their kids toward their cars and were staring. Billy backed away. “He didn't tell you shit,” he hissed, then turned and jogged, head down, to his truck. He tore out of the parking lot and down the road. Paul slowly opened his door and climbed into the driver's seat.

“So, like, I'm freezing now.” Shane liked to imitate the snooty tone of the teenagers on
Glee
.

“Sorry.” He turned the ignition and cranked the heat.

“That's okay,” the boy said. Shane grabbed another slice of pizza and devoured the rest of his piece as they drove. “Dad says you're a goof,” he told Paul in a kind and conspiratorial tone.

“Your dad's probably right.” Paul tried to smile.

Encouraged, the boy added, “Says you're a home renter.”

“A home renter?” He studied Shane's face in the rear-view mirror, the shape of his jaw beneath the baby fat. The boy was like a translucent shell, the Wentz blood clearly running underneath.

The entrance to Elsie's place smelled musty, like clothes dampened by sweat, and Gina urged him not to stay long or even cross the threshold of the apartment. “I don't want you to get sick,” she said, although she didn't seem worried about Shane.

He handed her the pizza boxes as the boy kicked off his boots and raced into the living room. No point telling her about Billy. She looked completely rundown. “I'm sorry about things,” he said. “I was just frightened that day. Hardy freaked me out. The way he acted.”

She smiled wearily. “Quit apologizing, goddamn it.”

“You sure you don't need help?”

She kissed him on the cheek, dismissing him. She had fallen into things too quickly with Billy and wouldn't make the same mistake again. Or maybe she found it easy to keep her bearings with Paul, not get swept up in things or leave herself vulnerable. He inspired a careful apportioning of passion, rational doses of lust.

He woke up from a dream of a chaotic brawl—things clattered and fell. An uncontrolled, mindless noise from upstairs. Something knocked hard and steady against a wall—a bed frame, a kitchen table. With each percussive slam came male grunts and curses, a girl's explosive, staccato sobs.

He was awake and not awake, lucid and mindless as a sleepwalker, still gummed up in the residue of a dream. The sound of her crying out made him rise from the bed, his body tingling. He stood, and his cock pulsed and swayed, solid and heavy in his hand. There was a door hidden in a wall somewhere. He was certain, in an instinctive, animal way, that the door he wanted was in the living room where the wall was blank and white. He pawed and scraped at the wall looking for hinges, cracks. Nothing. Someone had superimposed a new house over the old house, and the bedroom door—but whose bedroom?—was gone. No echo of hollow space behind the wall. His mouth filled with a thick, salty saliva, and he emptied the spit into his hand and rubbed it over his erection. The noise upstairs had faded, but now someone was crying, a muffled sound. Sonya upstairs, or the woman in the room he couldn't find. He needed to be in that room, but the house's foundation had been turned in some direction to confuse him. The unfindable room in the centre of the house. He went into the bathroom and flicked on the light, saliva still draining into his mouth as though from a wound, and came. The orgasm buckled his knees, not from pleasure but from a sharp throb of pain—and the surreal absence of ejaculate.

He thrust a hand against the mirror to keep upright and stared at his clean, empty hand, the pristine rim of the sink. There was no proof, other than the fading pain in his groin, that he'd come at all. This was like a dream in which you flew without wings, were cut but did not bleed, shouted but did not make a sound.

He slumped to the cold tile floor, fully awake now. The crying upstairs had stopped, or had never been. There was no bedroom hidden behind the wall, his apartment was bare and plain. The memory, the eerily tangible presence of the old house, was gone. He'd never lived in such a place.

3

Sex was not a route on which he could travel backward. It had propelled him forward, inexorably and mercilessly, from that first dizzying, alien spasm at adolescence, onto whatever so-called sex life he was granted, for as long a time as it was granted. Could he pass through the damp crucible of incontinence and impotence and come out the same old Paul?

In the morning, he soaped and palmed his groin while in the shower and achieved nothing. As the day went on, he tried to focus on sex, as though a type of mental discipline were required. His body remained mulishly indifferent, refusing to be pulled and tugged toward arousal. Truthfully, he didn't even feel like thinking about it. By lunch, he was convinced that last night's events hadn't taken place, or had been a strange fluke, an accidental jolt of nerve endings.

Gina came by in the late afternoon to tell him Elsie was getting better, but she'd stay at her mother's for a few more nights to make sure. She'd just dropped Shane off at Billy's.

“Was he angry?” Paul asked.

“About you picking up my kid? Shane told me about that right after you left.”

“I didn't want to add to your worries.”

“Billy said it was a misunderstanding. No big deal.”

He didn't believe her—such diplomatic words didn't feature in Billy's vocabulary. “Well, never mind then.”