Racket Page 4

  And then we are leaving the hot, slippery air of the bar for the warm, wet air of a springtime night. We run, holding hands, for the line of cabs at the end of the street, trying to avoid the stream of water and refuse, trying to avoid the deluges pouring from the roofs in waves. He throws open the door of a cab and we crawl in and the relative silence within the car envelops us. There is the spit and hiss of the dispatcher, pebbles of rain hit the roof, the wiper blades swish, but it is all wrapped in a gauzy layer of quiet. The driver is taciturn and after asking Where to? doesn’t speak. He has a throat lozenge in his mouth and the air in the cab smells of menthol. It clicks against his teeth as he moves it around inside his mouth with his tongue.

  The man and I sit in the backseat pressed leg to leg. His hand is moving up my thigh. His fingers are hard as if the flesh has fallen away and he is touching me with his bare bones. A subterranean rumbling fills my ears. It floods the car, a noise like the sound of engines starting when you are standing on the deck of the ferry, a noise that starts in the soles of your feet and moves its way upward through your body.

  The car crawls up New Gower past the churchyards with their flocks of prostitutes leaning against the fences like sodden sparrows. We snake our way through the labyrinth that is Rawlins Cross with its riddle of one ways and yields and do not turn rights. We come up along Bannerman Park.There is a house on the corner with a little hexagonal window and in the window is the face of a person, a bust, and sometimes the face looks in at the interior of the house and sometimes she sits in profile but today she is looking out as we pass, watching us drive by in the taxi. The Needs Convenience is ablaze with light and then, again, the noise.

  The noise is guttural and low. The cab begins to shake. A thousand dishes clatter. Panes of glass begin to fall from the buildings lining the street, shattering like melting icicles in a spring thaw. There is the sharp crack of branches snapping from ancient trees. The man grabs at my hand. In the cab there is still an envelope of silence and no one says anything, no one curses or prays or exclaims and when the earth stops trembling he opens the door and the silence that has been contained inside the vehicle floods out. He pulls me onto the road and the whole world is quiet, the calm thick. The rain has stopped.

  A hole has opened in the pavement in front of the cab. The driver has come out also and is gazing into it. A car has fallen in and a truck. A big piece of the sidewalk is missing and the porch on the house in the corner is still attached but barely. It is leaning. It is literally holding on by the nails. I wonder if the face in the window still has her nose, her ears. The man grabs at me and we leave the cab behind and begin to walk across the park. There are holes everywhere, holes with no bottoms, in the ground but also in the skyline, places where there had been trees but now there are not. A tree lies across a hole like a bridge. A telephone pole has been uprooted, the wires have come loose. There is the sound of electricity snapping and a tree catches on fire, flames shooting skywards.

  We stop next to the gazebo. The roof has caved in. There is a pop and the lights go out and there is the second of space, like the second between throwing a coin and it hitting the bottom of a wishing well and the man is suddenly, frantically kissing me, his hands like manic crabs pinching at the buttons of my shirt, the hem of my skirt, my hair. His lips cover mine. I am suffocating. He fills my mouth with his tongue. I try to remove his pinchers, pluck at his arms. He is strong. Once, in the summer, I had taken my niece to see the seals at the Marine Lab in Logy Bay and there had been a touch tank filled with sea creatures: crabs and sea anemones with undulating tentacles and clams that opened and shut their mouths and sea cucumbers that were leathery and slippery at the same time and heavy with sea water and that is what his tongue feels like as it touches my teeth and I bite it and the crabs let go and I run. It is dark and I run and he is right behind me running in the dark with the holes and then there is a tree root reaching out like a finger and I trip and fall onto my side and he is behind me and also trips but instead falls forward and then he is hanging on. He has caught himself on the root and he is dangling and I crawl over to look and I cannot see the bottom. The pit is at the edge of a perfectly intact flowerbed. There is a row of golden marigolds and another of pansies. The soil I am kneeling in is wet and black. Hard little twigs that have snapped off their branches press into the flesh of my hands.

  He looks up at me with his eyes that are black holes and his mouth with its tongue like a sea creature starts to make words but I stand and smash down on his fingers with the heel of my boot again and again and I don’t hear him say anything, not one single word, and then he is gone.

  I hear sirens in the distance. The park smells of fresh dirt, of spring. The wind begins to blow, a low, keening howl. I pull my sweater tight around me and begin the long walk home.

  23 Things I Hate in No Particular Order

  Gary Newhook

  I’M PISSED OFF and I’m drunk, so I’m good and uninhibited now. I know you would not approve, Dr. Carlson, but this was the only way the letter was going to happen. I will probably feel like a dope when you make me read this at the next meeting.Yes, I am breaking the fourth wall here, writing nonfiction is not my strong suit (Ha ha).

  First, I will tell you about my childhood.

  I think I was a pretty normal kid. I drew little pictures, I played Nintendo with my older brother, Clarke, and my room was caked in Transformers. I had Transformers wallpaper, a Transformers bedspread, and the two-foot tall Optimus Prime that turned into a transport truck. I would draw pictures of Transformers in an exercise book on the table in the corner of my room, and I’d write little stories to go with the pictures. My dad bought the exercise books off me for a dollar apiece as I finished each one. I think this is because my mother told him they should encourage my talent. She always read these articles in Reader’s Digest and other magazines about raising your child with the self-esteem they would need to survive the digital age. She really believed all that stuff.

  We lived on a farm on Pork Chop Hill. It wasn’t really an active farm in my lifetime; we just called it the farm. My great-grandfather raised pigs there, and then my grandfather raised pigs there, then my father decided he would be a veterinarian instead of raising pigs. What we called the farm when I was growing up was just a big grassy field behind our house.

  The earliest thing I can remember is sitting in my room, colouring. I don’t remember what I was colouring, but that probably isn’t important.

  My mother shouted, “Clarence! Look out your window!”

  When I looked out the window, my dad was driving around on the farm in a baby-blue minivan. He waved and the long blades of grass tickled the chassis. We all piled in the van and I remember the buttons on the tape deck. They looked like big blocks of dark chocolate that made a loud thunk when you pushed them.

  It was the first new vehicle my father ever owned. That night, he took us to the Dairy Queen on Topsail Road.

  That should be enough to set things up, really. A fairly typical childhood for someone growing up right outside St. John’s. Now, for the other thing you asked me to write about, here is a list of things that makes me angry when I think about them. These are in no particular order:

  1) Paying taxes to the municipal government. I feel like no matter how high taxes get, no matter how far they push the mill rate up, town services don’t get any better.Why, why, why is my road always last to get plowed in winter? Most of the men on the snow clearing crew are these big bubbas with grade-eight educations who don’t know what they’re doing.

  2 ) People who don’t come to the animal shelter for their pets. On the last Thursday of every month, the local SPCA rounded up all the unclaimed animals and brought them to my father to be put down. On those days, he picked up a flask of Golden Wedding on the way home from work. He sat in the big recliner by the living-room window and stared out at the farm. The longer he sat there, the more Golden Wedding he put in the glass relative to the amount of water.

 
One evening he called me over and said, “Clarence, we are never getting a dog.”

  I asked why.

  He said, “Because I should have been a pig farmer.”

  3) The hacks at South Coast Post Literary Magazine in South Africa.They rejected my short story “Island” on the basis of not publishing science fiction. How stupid is that? They just excluded an entire genre of writing! Heaven forbid people broaden their horizons.

  4) While I’m on the subject of “Island,” thinking about Jack Chipman makes me angry. When we were in high school, the English teachers held a short-story contest.That’s when I wrote the first draft of “Island.” It was the first thing I wrote since I sold my father Transformers picture books for a dollar. Fucking Jack Chipman wrote a story about coming out of the closet. Guess who won?

  I am sick of people crossing politics with art. Your fiction, or any art, should not be a biography about how your cousin touched you and that led to your realization you were gay because you sort of liked it. The teacher who judged the contest was Miss Williams, a pumpkinesque woman who always wanted to seem like she was on the bleeding edge of progressiveness. She sat me down and explained that Chipman’s story was more riveting.

  5) Clarke always got to be Mario in Mario Bros.3.

  6) A community group successfully lobbied to get my hometown renamed. They said Pork Chop Hill was too morbid a name for a town full of young families. But Pork Chop Hill has a ton of history. There were a bunch of pig farms up there including my grandfather’s. It’s called Heaven’s Acres now. I hardly go up there anymore.

  7 ) Our next-door neighbour, Missus Evens, grew potatoes on the big hill behind her house. She filled empty Eversweet Margarine tubs with beer and put them all over the hill to keep slugs out of the potatoes. The smell of the beer drew the slugs toward the butter tubs, and then they’d fall in and drown.

  When I was eleven and Clarke was twelve, we snuck into her potato garden and drank all the beer. It was early August, so the potato plants were two or three feet tall. We crawled between them on all fours, exploring our own miniature jungle. Most of the butter tubs had limp, white slug corpses in them. The beer was flat and watery and I was pretty drunk after two or three tubs. Clarke poked his head through the potato plants, and shouted “Ogga booga!” like a jungle man and I laughed until my stomach hurt.

  The accelerated growth of Pork Chop Hill took care of Missus Evens’ potato garden. Two years later, she sold her land to a developer and moved to an old folks’ home in St. John’s. I watched them chip away at the potato garden, as it gave way to a subdivision full of prefabricated shitboxes. It’s been so long since I’ve seen it, when I close my eyes, I can barely picture the rows of potato blossoms anymore. Me and Clarke had so much fun up there.

  8 ) It’s years later and they’re building another subdivision where the farm used to be. The same place my poor old dad drove around in his new van, the same place I buried my hamster in a little cardboard casket and the same place me and Clarke used to play soccer.

  Sometimes I go up there and watch them working on the lots. If I sit there for too long, I just get angrier and angrier, so here’s what I do: I put a few mints in my mouth and let them sit on my tongue. Once they dissolve on their own, I know it’s time to leave.

  Lot 15 on Spring Hill Road is around where my hamster should have been buried. When they were working on the lot, I asked a man on a backhoe if he had dug up a hamster in a little cardboard casket. He said no, they had not dug up any hamsters that day. The lot is covered in grey compacted stone now, so I guess when they were trucking off the old topsoil, they trucked off my hamster as well.

  9) Collards and Things—a farming journal in Iowa that prints a short story in the back every month. They rejected “Island” because they found the premise too farfetched. The plot goes something like this: Global warming accelerates as humanity enters the 2100s, the ice caps melt, and the last people are living on an island in the Pacific, the only piece of dry land left on the planet as far as they know. The ocean has become so polluted and acidic they can’t leave the island, so they have to learn to get along as their food supply dwindles. A situation ripe for drama. It writes itself, really.

  10) The road they put behind our house when I was twelve. Dad got a letter from the town that said they were expropriating a portion of his land to put in a new road. It said he would be given fair market value for the land, and it explained that this sort of action was sometimes required in a growing town. My mother balled up the letter and threw it in the woodstove, but the road still got built anyway.

  The road was ten feet away from the back door. My brother and I spent that summer sitting on the back step, popsicles in hand, watching the road crew eat away a sliver of the big field that was always there. After that, we had one tenth of an acre of land on one side of the road, and nearly twelve acres on the other.

  Mom and dad fell into a bit of a routine following that. Every Friday they walked down to the store with the liquor outlet and my mother bought a half-dozen radio bingo tickets and my father bought a twenty-sixer of Golden Wedding. Sometimes he watched her play bingo, but most times he stared out the window at the blackened gulf between our house and the farm. When a set of headlights went up the road he said, “Someone’s driving on the farm.” My mother wouldn’t look up from her bingo cards.

  11) All the flyers the government sends me in the mail. How much does it cost to mail all that shit? People are crying for new hospitals and schools and road work. The government comes out and says they don’t have the money to pay for any of it, but then they send me a four-colour brochure in the mail every time someone in the Confederation Building takes a shit.

  12 ) This girl from high school, Amy. I was out drinking with some people from school. I didn’t drink much back then, but it was the 24th of May weekend, and everyone drinks on the 24th of May weekend. We were camping in this big field up behind town. It used to be a sod farm, but by that point it was an island of grass in a sea of trees. You can see why it was a popular teenage drinking spot.

  The fire was going really good and everyone was drinking beer, and I was way too drunk, way too early. I sat on a cooler by the fire and this Amy girl, this blonde with glasses and a tank top that showed off just a little cleavage said, “I have nowhere to sleep tonight.”

  Without thinking, I said, “I’m in a three-man tent by myself.”

  She didn’t look at me. She didn’t say yes or no or thanks. She just said, “OK.”

  I crawled in the tent and passed out on top of my sleeping bag. The sound of the tent door unzipping woke me up. I couldn’t focus very well, because I was still really wasted, but I could make out Amy crawling in. She lay down next to me and stared at me, and I was staring back, and I kissed her. Really quick. Just a quick peck on the lips. Then she didn’t react and everything was really still and quiet for a long time. Then she kissed me back. The next thing I remember she was on top of me and our pants were down around our ankles. I was trying to keep a good rhythm with my hips, but I was terrible at it and my ears were pounding and the top of the tenting was throbbing in and out to the beat of the pounding in my ears and it was making me sick so I closed my eyes and that’s the last thing I remember.

  That week in school, Amy wouldn’t talk to me. We probably didn’t say two words to each other after that. It does make me mad, in a weird way, when I think about it.

  The field is probably a subdivision now. I haven’t been up there since then.

  13 ) Every time I buy seeds and plant them, they never grow.

  14 ) One Friday night, Clarke and I were watching The Simpsons on channel twenty-six. Mom and Dad left to head down to the store like they always did.

  John Molson walked into the living room. His last name wasn’t really Molson, I don’t think. Everyone called him John Molson because he was always on the beer. A forty-year bender. I don’t know his real last name. His hair and beard were white. He always reminded me of a wizard from a fant
asy story. John Molson the perpetually drunk.

  My brother said, “Why are you here, John?”

  John Molson had this faraway look in his eyes. He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. He didn’t say anything. He just sat and stared at the wall.

  The reek of stale beer permeated the house.

  I leaned in toward Clark:“Should we throw him out?”

  We figured John Molson got too drunk and got lost.

  Then John Molson started to cry. Face in his hands, full-on bawling. Here we were, watching TV and this drunk man just comes in our kitchen and starts to cry. It was really fucked up. He lifted his head and looked at us, “Boys, phone the police. I just ran over your parents.”

  15) Why can’t we figure out a mixture of paint that will stay on the road for an entire winter? I don’t know if I’m supposed to turn or go straight.

  16) The Shaggy Summit Literary Magazine out of Canmore, Alberta. They said that while they did like the idea of the last remnants of humanity being stranded on an island together, not entirely sure if they are the only ones left, they found the protagonist’s story arc uncompelling. The main character loses his family in the flood, and they thought that was something the reader should see unfold within the story. What if he is trying to save his family so we can really cheer for him? The editor finished with, and I quote, “We want to see a character whose whole world disintegrates before our very eyes, not one whose life is already in shambles.”