You Could Believe in Nothing Page 8

  FIVE

  Winter returned overnight, shaking rooftops and drifting in the street. But daylight drained the storm, and the morning snow was light on the shovel. Even Mrs. Ennis across the street pushed it about, no longer bent with mid-winter fatigue. Cars slowed for pedestrians and made way for each other on single-lane streets. Snowploughs reclaimed the punch-drunk city with ease. By mid-afternoon the sky had turned a clean, expansive blue. People looked up and around, examining the horizon with a vague idea that the wider dimensions might somehow ease their troubles.

  Arriving home from work, Derek saw that Strickland had parted his curtains. His white head rose from the back of a chair just inside the window, like a marble bust pointed at the television.

  Derek warmed the oven and sat at the computer, watching hockey fights. Nothing new posted at the website, but he found a gem in the archives. A toothless ogre in a Penguins jersey bent his challenger at the waist so the face was exposed to repeated uppercuts. He watched it three times and sent the link around on email.

  The computer chimed, announcing an arrival at his inbox.

  your payment went through okay. i am mailing the DVD tomorrow.

  yours in hockey,

  Sully

  Finding a copy of the game had been harder than Derek imagined. Variations on blackhawks red wings 1965 “game tape” returned results in the tens of thousands. He had lost half an afternoon on the Internet before stumbling on “The Barton,” a message board for fans of the Chicago Blackhawks. Given the bleak state of the team—another near-last-place finish in the offing—Derek found the virtual township seething, its villagers gathering with pitchforks and torches. Active conversation threads included “fire everybody,” “groundhog day,” “please make a trade now,” and “fucked up the ass.” Derek imagined fat boys still living with Mom. But an all-caps tantrum posted by “stanleycupper” or “TonyO” could just as easily originate with your lawyer or deputy mayor. The passionate fan was not unlike the pervert, walking among us, churning with secret obsession.

  Derek posted his request as a new thread: “looking for game tape.”

  “u need sully—the one and only,” replied cheliossucks, helpfully including the link.

  Welcome To Sully’s Blackhawks site

  Greatest Blackhawks Games Ever

  Click here for Sully’s Ultimate Top 10 Hawks!

  Derek’s initial email had received a reply within the hour:

  yes i have hawks-wings semifinal game seven 1965.

  $40. PayPal accepted

  yours in hockey,

  Sully

  So the video was on its way. Derek wondered whether he and his father might watch the game together. But he knew this wouldn’t happen. He felt he ought to write back, bring a more personal touch to the Sully transaction.

  thanks a lot. my dad was at that game and he says its a classic. can’t wait to see it.

  Derek

  The doorbell sounded just as Derek slid his frozen pizza into the oven. A peek through the blinds revealed Shawn Gover on the doorstep, in his snow pants and heavily ornamented tool belt.

  “You hear that?”

  Gover opened his hand to reveal a silvery-blue device. It cried out, a cyclical whoop-whoop that might have warned of alien attack.

  “There’s your problem. Signal leakage. No stability.” The voice was stern with disappointment. “How many cable outlets in this place?”

  “Just the one.” Derek stepped back from the door.

  “Show me,” said Gover, reaching to remove his boots. “Show me, and we’ll smoke the bastard out.”

  Derek brought him to the living room and pointed to a hole in the baseboard where the television cable snaked through. Gover glanced around the room, silently mapping the invisible route, and asked to see the electrical panel. Derek led him through the warm kitchen and into the cold back porch.

  “Look at this.” Gover indicated a tangle of wires hanging behind the door. “Two, three splitters here. Fucking state. Your signal’s fractured altogether. Who put this in?”

  “I don’t know. One of you guys, I imagine.”

  Gover blew a sigh through pursed lips and set to work snipping and twisting, dismantling the mess. Then followed another silent moment as he pondered the result.

  “Going to hockey tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good man.” Gover fished a tiny metal box from his tool belt. It was smooth and burnished, reminding Derek of the tray where his mother left her rings when she did the dishes.

  “The CBC guy will be there,” said Derek.

  “What’s that all about?” With the deft twirl of a screwdriver, Gover was gathering the loose wires in the box. “Why should they put us on television?”

  “All I know’s what Brian wrote in the email.”

  Allan Marleau is a reporter on CBC news, aka Citywide at Six. He’s a friend of Greg Ricketts who used to play with us. He wants to do a TV story about a regular bunch of guys who play hockey. He’s picked us to do his story! This is great for us and something we can all get behind. He’ll be at the game Friday. Very casual. Allan has a regular part on the news every Thursday so check it out.

  Gover’s eyes were moving again, following the unseen path of the cable. “When your strength of signal is down, the amount of interference needed to screw it up is a lot less,” he said. There was more snipping and twisting, routing everything through the metal box.

  “Done,” said Gover, securing the box to the wall with a staple gun. He grinned and looked Derek in the eye, something he never did at the rink. He was withdrawn and quiet there, the man with the dead wife.

  In the living room, Derek turned on the television. The screen, which had gone inexplicably black the night before, reappeared with an electric spitting noise. It briefly scared the shit out of him. Every time he watched TV he half expected to see his father on the news, in one of those little mug shots over the announcer’s shoulder. “Whoring Scumbag,” would be the caption.

  “Cut out the shit and quadruple your signal. Simple, really.”

  “Thanks for this, Shawn.”

  Gover rearranged his tool belt and yawned, comfortable with silence. Derek fidgeted, shifting from one foot to the other. It was the first time he had opened the door to anyone since Nicole left.

  “I’ve got a pizza on, if you’re into it.”

  “Ah, no. Maybe a Pepsi or something, if you’ve got one.”

  A civil compromise. The intimacy of a shared meal would have tried the limits of their acquaintance. Besides, Derek was half embarrassed by his solitary dinner, how it announced Nicole’s absence. The domestic business of the apartment, eating and cleaning and the rest of it, felt small and shabby without her.

  A couple of weeks after they met, Derek and Nicole were sharing a bed almost every night. But her tenure in the apartment—splitting rent and leaving balled-up socks wherever she dropped them and turning dour with the tedium of rainy Sundays—amounted to less than a year.

  After the initial shock, it seemed as though the gonorrhea crisis had brought them closer. They fell into nurturing habits, holding hands, touching each other’s hair and clothes, kissing in the bathroom in the morning. They took their pills, and the infection drained away, leaving them clean and sterilized. But when they finally made love again it was different. Something vital had been cut out of them. Then she was invited to the job interview in Ottawa, and Derek drove her to the airport.

  He shut off the oven and brought two cans to the kitchen table. Gover sat carefully, not wanting to soil the chair with his greasy overalls. Derek envied the overalls and tool belt, how they announced a grasp of electricity and machinery. In school he had considered shop class a joke, infected by the notion that working with tools, struggling with objects and skinning your knuckles and smelling of solder, was dirty and stupid.

&nbs
p; “Brian is just the sort of guy to get sucked into that shit,” said Gover.

  “What shit?”

  “Some prick with a TV camera, nosing around.”

  Derek shrugged. He had been flattered by television’s interest, the way most people would be.

  “Do you ever watch the news on TV?” said Gover. “There’s not much news to it. Mostly it’s just people making a show of themselves. My father was stationed in Hamburg after the war, and he said you could go down to the red light district and pay to see people on a stage, screwing. They used to call it the fuck show. That’s all TV is. A fuck show. It’s the same thing, except they’re not allowed to show cocks and cunts.”

  Here was a flash of the old Gover, the anger rising in his voice and his eyes quivering behind thick glasses. The vicious temper was still in there somewhere.

  They both drank from their cans.

  “You ever play junior hockey?”

  “I got cut,” said Derek. “By Celtics.”

  “I played three years with Avalon. See that?” Gover indicated a molten lump on the bridge of his nose.

  “Fuckin’ guy from Clarenville took me down from behind. Right into the dasher board.” He slapped a palm on the table. “Fuckin’ blood. All’s I remember is fuckin’ blood and Dean Brennan laying into buddy. You should have seen the pounding Dean gave him.”

  Everyone who played junior came away with stories of blood and stitches, retold in the same spirit of innocence as one might recall a toddler’s tumble.

  “Now, my young fella, he’s up in New Brunswick,” said Gover. “Maritime junior league. Having the time of his life.”

  Derek didn’t know there was a young fella. He thought the wife died without children, leaving Shawn alone.

  “They brought him up for a tryout,” said Gover. “Offered to pay the whole shot, which got me off the hook. There’s six Newfoundlanders on the team. Playing hockey. Having a few laughs. There’s a bit of skin to be had, too. You know it.”

  “How old were you when he was born, Shawn?”

  “Sixteen. Grade ten. Mom and Dad looked after him until I got a bit older. Now he’s pretty much on his own. Just like that.” A snap of the fingers.

  He stood and made for the hallway. Derek turned the light on. He tried to picture Gover as a boy, eyes wide with fear, a newborn baby flushed and angry in his arms.

  “His mother’s long gone,” said Gover. “Haven’t seen her since high school. She married a guy and went out to Whitehorse. Hardly sees Randy at all.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Get this, now. Her husband phones me up a couple of years ago and says if Randy wants to see his mother, I got to pay his plane ticket out there. I said, ‘It’s none of your fuckin’ business. It’s between me and Linda.’ Buddy says, ‘Well, I’m handling this for Linda.’ So I said, ‘Fuck you, cocksucker. And tell Linda she can go fuck herself.’ ”

  Derek attempted a sympathetic noise. He only knew Gover as a man in overalls. His wife had died. He wouldn’t change with his line. Now he was out the door and down the steps.

  “She’s fucked up, man. Going to psychiatrists and stuff. Her mother told me that. Her mother’s alright.”

  Into the van, he turned the ignition and rolled down a window, raising his voice above the engine.

  “Her mother says it’s about betrayal. Linda’s blaming herself and she can’t face it because it feels like betrayal and she can’t go back to it. I said, ‘It’s not like that, if only she’d try.’ Your signal should be good there now. Let me know.”

  “Okay, thanks,” said Derek.

  Gover shifted into drive. “Tomorrow night!”

  And he was gone.

  Derek closed the blinds, pulled off his jeans, and crawled under the comforter on the couch, changing the TV to the CBC so he could check out Citywide at Six. He didn’t watch much news, didn’t watch much of anything except sports and the old movie channel, and porn and hockey fights on the computer. Popular culture wasn’t invisible to him. But it touched lightly on his consciousness, like the headlines of a news ticker, rolling by at the bottom of a screen without context. The names of movies he’d never see, stars from TV shows he didn’t watch, snippets of music he knew to be popular, but so foreign to him it was like a strange language.

  The Citywide camera had cornered a young woman named Madeline. Her blouse opened at the neck, where her reddened skin disappeared into the dark hollow between her collarbones.

  “There’s so much talent in Newfoundland and Labrador,” she said. “So much potential.”

  She raised a hand and touched her throat. Derek guessed that her skin smelled faintly of fresh apples. He had seen it before, how the evening news slipped into a kind of somnolent eroticism. It reminded him of high school, that feeling of something warm in every room. You might ignore it for days at a time. Then you would lose yourself in the crush between classes or see a girl daydreaming in history class, and it would seize your body like a poison.

  Allan Marleau sat across from Madeline, eyebrows knitted. He was interviewing her in a blank space, the backdrop white. He asked if she was afraid of failure.

  “You cannot let fear control your life.” She touched her throat again. The hand lingered at the collar, the ivory shell of her fingernails shining sadly under the television lights. “I don’t believe in regret.”

  Now Allan filled the screen, his head jiggling as he took on the camera.

  “Vision and grit do not guarantee success,” he said. He was young, with chiselled black hair and a pink open-necked shirt under a pinstriped black blazer. “Nobody knows where the future leads for Madeline and her groundbreaking software company. But this is a new generation of Newfoundlanders. They are not afraid of power. For Citywide at Six, I’m Allan Marleau.”

  Derek didn’t see much power in Madeline. He saw a deep, soaking disappointment; a woman dozing off on the couch every night and waking with a shiver, wishing she could meet somebody. Maybe he was imagining too much. But he was convinced she was broken, one way or another.

  When Nicole did her work term as a physiotherapist, she had been unprepared for all the broken people, the defenseless humanity of the place. The accident victims, bruised and delicate as premature babies, labourers with backs and shoulders clenched into fists of pain, and so many ordinary, damaged bodies. On her second day, she watched a large man with unworkable arms burst into silent tears, just sitting there in the waiting room.

  It was not quite two years ago, their first summer together. Nicole juggled two summer jobs. Three days a week, she would leave the clinic and walk up a leaf-shaded avenue to Churchill Square and a four-hour shift at the coffee shop. Every Friday evening she arrived at Derek’s apartment, her black shopgirl outfit stained and sweet with ice cream. Upstairs, she would undress and wash her feet. Derek could track her progress from the kitchen, listening to the rush of water and the squeak of her feet in the bathtub as he poured white wine and opened a beer. Then they’d sit on the bed, sipping drinks until the room went dark and Nicole slept. After helping her under the covers, Derek would bring up three more beers and turn on the television. He watched a lot of old war movies, Nicole breathing at his side and summer blowing through the window while American pilots firebombed Dresden and Japanese generals beat prisoners in sweltering island compounds. This was happiness. But he had no idea.

  She was still living with Margot in the house on Leslie Street. Margot slouched about in pyjamas all day and took pills with sci-fi names like Effexor and Zopiclone. Derek had read the labels in the bathroom cabinet. Then came the morning she stopped him on the stairs and pushed a hand up under his shirt. Nicole was already gone to work. Margot pinned him to the wall, and after a frozen moment Derek kissed her. Her mouth was warm with coffee; they held the kiss long enough for him to register that. Then Margot turned and sprinted up the stairs. She never loo
ked him in the eye again.

  On the first Sunday in August, a couple of weeks before the gonorrhea thing, he arrived at Leslie Street early. Margot let him in and disappeared. Derek sat in the kitchen while Nikki showered and dressed and thumped down the stairs like a teenaged boy. She took two Tylenol and found a pair of scissors to clip loose threads from her sleeve.

  They drove to the church in silence, bothered by the first twinges of self-consciousness between them. That summer was muggy, with hot winds from the west. They were slowed by the heat, and by the realization that the strange acceleration of the last few weeks had been too much. They were queasy from their animal need to be together.

  The parking lot was nearly empty. They were twenty minutes early. Nicole blew her nose.

  “Fuck,” she said, searching her bag. “Forgot my antihistamines.”

  Derek suggested a walk through the graveyard, though the sun was already full in the sky.

  “You shouldn’t have come for me so early.”

  “She’s your sister,” said Derek. “I didn’t want your family in a panic.”

  They had a quiet spat and waited for other cars to arrive.

  Light through the stained glass windows scattered tablets of blue and red up the centre aisle of the church. Derek and Nicole sat near the front, eavesdropping on the couple behind them. The man said he wasn’t going to church anymore.

  “You were never fully committed,” said the woman.

  “It’s always been a conflict,” he replied. “But without that conflict, there are so many things I never would have done.”