The Push & the Pull Read online

  The Push & The Pull

  The Push & The Pull

  a novel

  DARRYL WHETTER

  Copyright © 2008 by Darryl Whetter.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by

  any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval

  system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the

  Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright,

  visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Cover photograph by Arkadiusz Stachowski, courtesy istockphoto.com.

  Cover and interior design by Kent Fackenthall.

  Printed in Canada on 100% PCW paper.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Whetter, Darryl, 1971-

  The push and the pull / Darryl Whetter.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-507-7

  I. Title.

  PS8595.H387P88 2008 C813’.6 C2007-907359-X

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the

  Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development

  Program (BPIDP) and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for

  its publishing activities.

  Goose Lane Editions

  Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For Nicole Dixon and the distance

  she travelled with a small knapsack one May

  Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes.

  One day you’d think misfortune would get tired,

  but then time is your misfortune Father said.

  — William Faulkner

  What! art thou verily striving to stay the swing of the

  revolving wheel? Oh, stupidest of mortals, if it takes to

  standing still, it ceases to be the wheel of Fortune

  — Boethius

  1

  This one’s still alive. Another smashed bird tossed onto the roadside gravel. Behind, beside, now past the twitching bird, the spokes of Andrew Day’s touring bicycle continue to slice the fat light of sunset. The tall black centaur of his shadow stretches out behind the right rear pannier and spills onto dry gravel, ditch, strokes the circling bird. He stops pedalling and brakes, feels the wounded bird without looking back.

  No traffic smirks in front of him or snarls in the little disc mirror dangling off his handlebar so he shoves the cumbrous touring bike into a full two-lane circle. The sharp turn forces one of the plump red front panniers back until it nearly touches his dusty grey shoe. Two days out of Halifax and he still isn’t used to the weighted panniers, how they gulp in every turn.

  Turning again he re-approaches the grounded bird. Stops, unclips his shoes from the tight grip of the pedals. He climbs off the bike for the first time in hours. Heat, sweat, thirst and ache leap at him as soon as he stands. Tipping back head, shoulders and ribs, he tries to unstring his bowed spine, temporarily reverses the fall of sweat. Nova Scotia valleys dip and run in front and behind, incised by the endless Trans-Canada Highway. His metal cleats crunch on stones as he approaches the bird. It moves but travels nowhere, crawling around and around in a small radius of injury.

  The roadkill is constant, much more than you see from a car. Five birds yesterday. Porcupines. A skunk, two coons. Closer to Halifax there’d been cats. Wind, rain and sun, or another fast run of the tires flatten these dark mounds into puddles then finally just bumpy stains, road scabs. The bodies last longer over on the gravel, the rips and smashes almost preserved by the dust.

  The side of the road. If not dead animals or fast-food litter then blown truck tires — black, shredded strips strung out for half a kilometre or more. Pedalling steadily in the recurrent backdraft of the trucks, shiny Lycra tight on his skin, Andrew needs to know how high and wide the flak of each blown tire can reach. When the trucks roar past him, he can feel his organ donor card tucked into the compact tool kit beneath his saddle.

  He rests the bike’s warm top tube against a humming thigh while leaning over the ruined bird. A truck thunders past, and the bird’s fine, mottled breast feathers ruffle in the blast. More than a wing hangs broken. Part of the beak and, worse, an eye are so wrongly pulled. In a car he’d let the speed rationalize, anaesthetize, spirit him away. Touring now at one-quarter of that speed, he’d feel the quivering bird tethered to him on the roadside for valley after valley, share every fading tremor. He straddles the top tube without mounting the bike and raises the front forks like the plunger on a blasting box. Aiming the tire between the swollen panniers etches the bird more deeply, sews that tiny bead of an eye forever into his memory. Looking away he shoves the laden front forks down to crush the twitching bird. The bird, at least, he puts out of misery.

  2

  Stan was driving and Pat was in the passenger seat, both parents together, so Andy could only have been six or seven. Summer in the early 1980s. He and Mitch were in the back seat, cousins fighting over Big Jim, a large plastic action figure. Most of the doll’s hard back had been cut out to form a tombstone-shaped button that drove a feeble but televisable karate chop in one arm. Countless times at home Andy had slid off Big Jim’s zippered track suit top to run a thumb or fingertip over the narrow gap that surrounded the impressible button on Big Jim’s toffee-coloured back. The large button was the shape of a piece of toast and constituted almost all of the action figure’s smooth back. Andy half expected the button to fall out into his hands. Mystery aside, Big Jim was currently in contest. Andy and Mitch yanked, pulled and twisted the half-naked plastic man.

  They’d been driving in the summer heat for two hours, Andy and Mitch fighting nearly that long. Pat had bribed, reasoned, yelled. She’d already confiscated an India rubber ball and two Micronauts. Her molars churned with the certainty that these two would fight over air so long as they had an audience. Called it. Did not. Her window was already down, so no one saw it coming. In a flash she turned and dug her hand between the boys, wrestling the undressed doll from their surprised grip. Uncoiling back through the car, she hauled Big Jim in front of their startled faces, past Stan’s curved shoulder and across her own fuming chest to fling him into the wind.

  The two-pitch drone of tires and engine flooded the car. Tinny AM music returned. Stan glanced once at his wife. Each of them knew red splotches were flooding the unseen plain of her chest. Stan could feel them pulse and spread as he braked. The drop of tires onto gravel was the banging of a gavel, the car’s halt the verdict of a stern jury. Raising his right hand up for the gearshift, he needed to wedge the top of his left under what remained of his right triceps for extra lift. Finally, he turned his head as far as he could, not past his shoulder like Mitch’s father or even Grandpa. Instead, the reach of Stan’s head stopped just before his shoulder. Only his eyes could reach past the lock of bone, and they tried to ignore the tight line of his wife’s compressed lips.

  Even with his seat belt, Andy turned owlishly until both shoulders were parallel to the window. Diagonal, he kept thinking, diagonal. Stan, Andy and Big Jim in the distance behind him, they were a diagonal line. If he just rode the syllables, he could block out the rest. Diagonal. He could see each of three unevenly spaced points on this line.

  “Where?!” Stan barked, accelerating the reversing car more and more.

  “Farther,” Andy mumbled, “farther.”

  3

  Nearly two decades later, Andrew and Betty were in Stan’s old bedroom, his parents’
ex-bedroom. Andrew said, “My father’s body went crazy,” after Betty’s one night in his Kingston house had become two, four, five and growing. But Stan’s wasn’t a body he could just talk about. He had to show her.

  Andrew and Betty, each of them twenty-two years old, students. Their bodies becoming their own. Their minds finally beginning to soar.

  Although Betty was okay with Andrew imitating Stan’s half-paralyzed arms, she suddenly wished he would slip back into some underwear for this bit of family theatre. For the first time in their heady, intoxicating week, Betty thought this might not be the best moment for Andrew to be naked. She lay in Stan’s old room and in his bed as the healthy son tried to show her the body of the sick father.

  Andrew stood beside the bed where she lay prone, switching between director and fellow actor. “At times he could barely get the arm off the bed,” Andrew clarified. “He only had this little bit of strength on the underside of his shoulder. You try. Use just enough muscle to get your arm above the hip. That’s right. I’d say, No cheating. Think shoulder. Really he’d be cheating like crazy, throwing it from the hips, twisting the ribs, whatever he could. Pucker up the right hand. Pull the knuckles back toward the forearm. And roll the thumb and pinky toward each other. Feel that little pouch in your palm? Okay, and up. I’d have to tow the arm up, and for weeks he couldn’t hold it there himself. Stiffen your arm. He had some strength in the shoulder but not much in the biceps. Picture the whole arm in a plastic pipe perpendicular to the shoulder. Forget about your elbow. Yeah, you can hold that. Okay now, Stanner, give me some disco.” Andrew held his own arm out stiffly and swept it back and forth from the shoulder. “C’mon, Daddy-o, cut a circle into heaven. Bigger. Bigger.” Accelerating her circle one minute then slowing it the next, he asked her, “Feel how my fingers can do support or resistance?” Eventually, with Betty’s arm raised, Andrew’s hand ceased being that of a physiotherapist. “All those years of exercising him, though, I never realized how much access this gave me to his boobs.”

  “Hey. Hey!” she said, swatting him.

  4

  Cycle enough and you will be shouted at, and with heavier ammunition than the irate Get off the fucking road! bellows of those jealous or proprietary city drivers whose only experience with kilometres involves a burning engine. (Let’s see them piss without leaving the vehicle.) Ride long enough and you will hear muffle, muffle, ASSHOLE! or muffle, muffle, SON OF A BITCH! or that focal point of eye, if not mind: muffle, muffle, UP YOUR ASS! These high-wire wits only strike from a car, always in groups and usually from the rear passenger seat. Some young thug in a strip-mall T-shirt and a pair of yellowing jeans cranes as much of his beefy neck as possible out the window to bellow as the carload of superior intellect races past, somehow cracking the mechanical codes to realize that they are in a car and you, you faggot, are not. Utterly lost to the auto, they cannot see the finer points of challenge, self-propulsion or province-crushing endurance. Nor can they quite master the physics of a projected voice and a moving car. Stepping back to life before Newton, they shout into the wind as their fat American cars approach. These drama slaves turn to face you only for the punchline. Muffle, muffle, FUCKER! Muffle, muffle, GET A CAR!!

  5

  If Betty’s ass had truly been such a sunflower, what was it doing on the cold, filthy rim of Andrew’s toilet bowl?

  “I’m sure you’ve heard some of this before,” he had said to her once, walking home from campus. “Something like the science of ubiquity. Sine waves and guitar frets. Tornadoes, whirlpools. In your tub, in a river, a whirlpool is the same shape, and it’s made out of moving molecules. So the shape, the form, is, what?, pre-existing in nature. You know, pattern. There’s a fixed number of spirals in the face of every sunflower. You can cover up part of the sunflower and see, exactly, where the rest of the spiral will be because it’s some kind of number sequence. Pine cones too. I don’t just think you have a beautiful ass, the most beautiful ass ever. I look at your ass — hip becoming ass, leg becoming ass — these curves are beautiful in and of themselves, but I swear they also show me a deeper pattern, world beauty. Clearly, Plato was an ass man.”

  All this talk and yet after three weeks he still left the seat up. She knew as she flushed that he’d still be exactly where she’d left him, glued to the couch one floor down, head lolling as he listened to music. The rage that shot her off the damp toilet rim had time to collect as she walked back through halls, down stairs and across the entrance-way, time to sharpen and gleam. The very skirt that had made the drop to the bowl so quick (would she have checked if wearing jeans?) enabled her plan.

  “I was wondering,” she began, crossing to where he dangled his head off the edge of the couch, “if you’d like some ass.” The pleated charcoal skirt was short enough that she simply had to saw a little wool left then right. Perfectly, predictably, he cranked his body around to get under her. She cooed and did ass until his head dropped fully over the edge of the cushion and his heels climbed the couch’s back.

  “If you want this ass,” she said, glancing back for a final check on his cramped arms and legs, “then love it!” She clamped his head between her thighs. “Love it by leaving the seat down. Got it?! Got it?!” She reached down for a few playful pinches at his cheeks. “Easy, Tarzan. Your arms are not as strong as my thighs. Look up here. Relax. Stop fighting and I’ll stop squeezing. Okay? Okay? Listen. You’ve got bad Ass Rhetoric. If we’re going to live together, don’t think right or wrong. Don’t think man or woman. Don’t dare think chore. Think more or less ass. You want this ass? Keep it happy, and keep the seat down.”

  6

  Although small, the Sunnyvale Clinic still had one long hallway Stan and the late-adolescent Andrew had to walk down, still had the fumigated smell of a hospital, that sharp bullring in the nose. Andrew was grateful when Stan tried to start whatever conversation he could.

  “Clinic originally meant ‘of, or pertaining to, a bed,’” said Stan, ever the teacher.

  “Really? . . . Infectious Diseases of a Bed,” replied Andrew, all the while calculating distances, worries and threats as they walked. Make the edge of that open door. Inside edge of its window. Outside.

  “Advanced Summer Tennis about a Bed,” Stan continued.

  “Public Speaking about a Bed.”

  Stan was okay in the hallway, no cane, no walker. Andrew walked his slow shadow walk, certain Stan too must be swinging from guarded hope to dissolving pessimism to simple impatience.

  “So,” Andrew asked, “what kind of clinic is this?”

  “I don’t know. You’ve got the directions.”

  “I got us here, didn’t I? Seriously, what kind of clinic is this? OT? Muscle? Are there muscle clinics?”

  “Kind? Christ, I don’t know.”

  Like toddlers who close their eyes in hopes of avoiding danger by ignoring it or people in the 1950s who turned their TVs off before undressing or having sex, clinics, doctors’ offices and hospitals politely ask us to limit our knowing to seeing. In a hospital, however, a bedpan needs more than a curtain to hide. One hears so much.

  Waiting in their curtained cubicle, Andrew and Stan couldn’t help but hear the adjacent conversation, and each counted floor tiles to avoid eye contact.

  “Cold,” a boy said with a crispness either decisive or affected. “Cold. Cold. Warm.”

  “It was after a bath,” a woman added, “and he says, ‘Get that cold cloth offah me.’ I felt like I’d been bit.”

  “Yes. Mm-hmm. Keep your eyes closed, Tyler. A few more.”

  “Warm. Warm. Cold.”

  “Okay, Tyler, rubber hammer time.”

  When a human shadow finally advanced across the curtain of their own examination cubicle, Andrew and Stan would’ve signed up for anything just to get out of there. By injecting stale urine into the muscles. . . . Derived from boiled rabbit spleens, this serum . . .

  “Mr. Day. Sorry to keep you waiting. Let’s get to the gear.” This technician or therapist
or salesman held out the antithesis of a Walkman. The unit was small and portable and obviously battery-powered, but electrodes dangled instead of earphones. “We’ll show you and your — must be your son, looks just like you — we’ll show you and your son how simple the Medtronic is to use. If you’re satisfied and ready, you can begin building muscle tonight. Funny that a computer runs this little thing, because computers are a good analogy. You know that computers work with a series of ons and offs. So do muscles. When we want to take a bite out of a hamburger, our biceps need to contract on one side and expand on the other to lift the burger. One side’s on; the other’s off. Stan, you don’t need me to tell you that the on and off commands your brain sends aren’t always being obeyed. Unstimulated, the muscles atrophy, and there’s less of them there the next time the signal does get through. The Medtronic sends a regular signal to fire those muscles all night long. We’ll start with sixteen-second intervals. Ask the Chinese track team about the benefits of working out while you sleep.”

  Fine, but can I still grab my pecker? Andrew knew his father was thinking. Hand splint. Electrodes. The weakening arms.

  The clinic had a return policy, and Stan was about to lose his unique teaching job and the generous health plan that went with it. Stan went electric.

  An assistant arrived to show Andrew how to gel the electrodes, drawing rectangles and squares on Stan’s shoulders and arms in black marker, assuring Andrew that the electrodes would be more pliant if the unit was allowed to run for thirty seconds before they were applied. The ink outlines remained on Stan’s body for a week, as father and son absorbed wiring up Stan into their nightly routine, three more minutes after the trache tube and hand splint. By two weeks, Andrew could usually get it done without waking Stan — Stan surely not noticing the beery breath wafting above him. By then, the square and rectangular outlines had almost worn off Stan’s irregularly curved shoulders and his atrophied arms, inspection stamps fading from old meat.