Bow Grip (7 page)

I missed my dog already.

I took out the map, the yellow sticky note with Ally’s address on it, and the cowboy’s postcard. If I was reading things right, Ally’s place and the cowboy’s ex-wife lived at completely opposite ends of the city. I’d have to take the truck with me tomorrow. Today, I was going to just chill, read my book. Maybe take a nap.

The door of the room next to mine opened up and an older man came out, wearing navy blue work pants and a pair of spotless new steel-toed boots. He sat down at the other end of the bench and pulled out a pack of rolling tobacco.

“You want a tailor-made?” I extended my pack.

“Don’t mind too much if I do, thank you.”

He extended a still muscular arm across the bench and I shook a smoke out of my pack for him. Working-man hands. Gold watch, no rings.

He rattled a box of wooden matches in his left hand, slid it open with his thumb and shook one out. Lit the match by flicking the tip with a wide thumbnail. My mom’s brother, my Uncle Reg, used to be able to do that. Now his hands shook too much from the MS.

“Name is Hector McHugh.” He dangled the smoke from the corner of one lip and shook my hand.

“Joseph Cooper. Nice to meet you, Mr McHugh.”

“Hector, please. No need to mister me.”

“Hector.”

He stared past the swimming pool, over the tracks, down the hill towards the city. “Not a bad view from this spot, once it gets dark and the lights go on. I’ve been here for six weeks now.”

I lit another smoke. So much for quitting. “Six weeks. You working in town for a while?”

“I’m retired.”

“You’re living here then?”

“I would call it more like resting. I’ve found myself at a bit of a crossroads.”

I nodded. If he wanted me to know what his choice of roads looked like, he’d tell me.

“I used to work as an expediter, for an outfit out of Edmonton. Diamonds. Northwest Territories are riddled with them. Mining camps and teams of surveyors and drillers all over the place, and they all need supplies. I was the man who found said supplies and acquired them, and saw to it that they were delivered. I kept a small apartment in Edmonton, but the better part of the time I was on the road. It’s a fine job, if you like to see the lesser travelled regions of the country.”

I just let him go. I could tell he needed someone to listen to him.

“Had a close call last spring. A little Cessna four-seater. Engine failure, over a particularly desolate stretch of the tundra. I thought that pilot was going to be the last soul I ever set my eyes on. I found myself apologizing to God for all my misdeeds.”

Hector raised his wiry eyebrows, to see if I was still listening. “And I’m not much of a religious man.”

“What happened?”

“The pilot managed to bring the plane down in a little lake, which scared the shit out of me even more than all those pine trees coming at us so fast. I’m not much of a swimmer, you see. But once I got the wind back into me, I
hung on to the cushion from my seat, and a guy in a speed-boat picked me up after about ten minutes. Couldn’t move my legs when he dragged me into the boat, though. Water’s still pretty icy in May.”

“The pilot?”

“Christopher. His name was Christopher Dawson. Young fellow, full of piss. He told me to hang on to something, that he was going to swim to shore and bring back some help.” Hector leaned over and dropped the cherry of his cigarette butt onto the concrete. Crushed it methodically with the tip of one boot, then slowly bent over to retrieve it. He dropped the butt into a tin bucket next to the bench and reached into his sweater pocket again for his pouch of tobacco.

“So by the time this guy drags me into his boat and we head off to find Christopher, it was too late. Took three days for them to drag the lake for his body. Coroner said the hypothermia probably got to him almost immediately because he was swimming so fast, and because he was in such good shape.”

I raised my eyebrow in a question mark.

“No body fat. No insulation. Swimming exposes the parts of the body that dissipate the most heat into the cold water. Myself, I have a bit of extra around the middle, and I did nothing but float around. That’s what saved me. Being a bit overweight and waiting around to be rescued.” He ran his tongue along the edge of the cigarette paper, gave it a twist, bit the end off, and spat it out. “Haven’t been able to get myself on an airplane since.”

The highway below us was turning into a caterpillar of headlights.

“Interest you in a bit of a drink, Joseph? How do you feel about single malt scotch?”

I folded up my map, stuffed it inside my coat, and followed Hector into the light escaping from his open door.

H
ector’s room was identical to mine, just flipped in reverse. He unwrapped the paper from a clean glass and dropped two ice cubes into it, followed by a healthy shot of scotch. It warmed my throat on its way down and collected in a hot pool in my belly.

Hector had pulled the bedspread off one of the beds in his room too, and replaced it with a heavy checkered blanket. His leather shaving kit was laid out neatly beside the little sink outside of the bathroom, his clothes hung up in the closet. Four identical pairs of work pants, denim shirts in several shades of faded, one brown suit, and one white shirt still in the drycleaner’s plastic. The television glowed into the middle of the room, its sound turned right down.

A brand new laptop shined silver and out of place on the bedside table, its charger plugged into the brass outlet in the base of the reading lamp.

“Like my new toy?” Hector ran the palm of one hand over the computer. “It’s not even a week old. I’m writing a book.” He looked proud of himself.

“A book? What’s it about then?”

“Two fellows who work a ranch together.”

“A cowboy type thing?”

“Something of the sort.” Hector pulled the straight back chair out from the little desk, dragged it on two legs into the centre of the room. “Have a seat, Joseph, and tell me what brings you to the Capri Motor Court. You in town for business?”

“Pleasure, I guess. If pleasure is the opposite of business. I run a garage in Drumheller. I’m just in the city for a couple of days. A holiday, I guess. Couple people I need to see. And I’m looking for a cello teacher.”

“You’ve got kids then?”

I shook my head. Guess I didn’t much look the musical type. “It’s for me, actually. I’m just learning. Don’t really know which end to start with, though, so I need a little help.”

“You’re the first cello player I ever met.”

I looked directly at Hector for the first time. What was left of his silver hair was cropped real short, almost shaved. His moustache and beard were neatly clipped, all straight lines. I put him in his early sixties.

“You’re the first writer I ever met.” I rattled the ice cubes in my glass.

He took off his sweater and hung it on the edge of the little suitcase rack next to the desk, then leaned over with the bottle of scotch and poured us both another shot. His hands were steady. Not a hard boozer, unless he was one of those guys who you could never tell were always plastered. Franco used to be like that, in his early days.

Hector’s T-shirt looked like it had just come out of the plastic wrapping, the fold lines still in it. He took a sip and made a face. “That’ll cure what ails you.” Fixed his brown eyes on me. “You married, Joseph?”

He had a way of staring right at me when he asked a question that kind of threw me off. Like he asked because he wanted to know, not just to make conversation.

“Divorced. About a year ago.”

Hector waited for me to continue, his eyes dark brown
and crinkled at the edges. I could feel the scotch working its warm way into my arms and hands.

“Actually, one of the reasons I came to Calgary is because I need to drop off the last of her stuff. She’s living here now, with her new … partner.”

“She’s remarried already?” Hector winced, sympathetic. “She didn’t run off on you with one of your buddies, did she?”

“Not exactly.” I was about to leave it there, but for some reason it wouldn’t stay. “We were married for five years, and I was crazy in love. She changed my life. I thought we were going to you know, do the whole thing. Get old together, teach the grandkids to water-ski. I learned to like vegetarian food. She’d been to Europe.”

I stopped, but Hector didn’t say anything. Just motioned for me to go on.

“So there I was, thinking I was the luckiest guy I knew, until a year and a half or so ago. Me and Ally had been trying to have a baby for a while and it’s not happening, so she has some tests done and then I have some tests done, and it turns out, it’s me who’s, you know, shooting blanks. So I guess I went through a hard time about it all, and she swore up and down that it didn’t matter. But then last October she sits me down at our kitchen table and tells me it’s over. She’s leaving. And then she does, like, the next day.”

I drained my drink. Hector held the bottle out, but I shook my head. My lips were already numb, and it wasn’t even six o’clock yet.

“She leaves town with the wife of this guy I play hockey with. They leave together.”

I looked at Hector to see if he was following me, but I
couldn’t tell. I didn’t know why I was telling him all this. I guess it was because of his eyes, and his story about the airplane and the lake. How the young guy died and the old guy didn’t. How when he asked me a question, I felt like had to tell him the real answer, because any minute either one of us could be gone.

“Together. As in lovers. The two of them.”

Hector sat back in his chair, like he was thinking about what I said, as opposed to thinking about what he was going to say back. So I kept talking.

“They are lesbians. Together.”

“I understood the first time around, Joseph. I just didn’t want to interrupt you. Go on.”

All of a sudden I felt like my chair was too small for my ass, like I had just woke up shirtless in front of someone I didn’t know.

“That’s it. I’m in town to drop off her books, so I can move on. Get a hobby. I’m learning the cello. It’s either that, or my mom and sister’ll put me on the Prozac. I’ve been a little hard to be around, they tell me.”

“That’s understandable, given your circumstances.”

“I don’t know why I talked your ear off about my sorry love life like that.”

“Because I asked.”

“Well, thanks for the drink, Hector. And the chat. It was really nice to meet you.”

He got up to shake hands. “The pleasure has been mine. You’re much more fun to talk to than the woman next door. Gin. Makes for a bitter outlook. Come by any time, Joseph, I’m here most of the time, typing away. I’m always up for some company, so don’t be shy to knock.”

The scotch was making me itch for another cigarette, plus I was thirsty. I felt around in my pocket for change and went in search of the drink machine. A small bottle of water cost $1.75. Freaky, when you thought about the fact that the Americans were scrapping on the other side of the world for oil, and here we were whining about paying ninety cents for a litre of gas for the truck, meanwhile they’re dinging us twice the price for drinking water, right here next to the Rocky Mountains. That was the kind of thing that would drive Allyson to fire off a stern letter to some CEO somewhere. She was a seasoned veteran of the stern letter. In the five short years she had been in Drumheller, she had headed up the letter writing brigade that had single-handedly forced the city to put speed bumps in the school zones, stopped them from backfilling the marsh off of Highway 26, and shut down the fertilizer factory until the company properly installed filters in its smokestacks.

There was another blue bench, identical to Hector’s and mine, bolted to the sidewalk in the little outdoor courtyard where the ice and pop machine stood humming in the dusk. I sat down and lit a cigarette, my bottle of water between my knees, weeping condensation onto my good pants. There were four stone and cement planters, evenly spaced on each corner of the courtyard, empty except for beer caps. Stand-up ashtrays full of white sand and cigarette butts next to both doors.

A little girl about six years old suddenly burst through the door that led to the rooms looking out onto the road. She had a ring of dried tomato sauce around her mouth, and she was dragging a plastic basket full of freshly folded laundry. The smell of warm air and fabric softener hung
in the air she brought out with her. A young woman in a matching velour tracksuit and flip-flops followed her, ten feet or so behind.

“Hold the door for Mommy, Raylene, my hands are full.”

I jumped to my feet to hold the door open for her. Mommy? She didn’t look like she could even be twenty. She must have had the kid when she was still a baby herself.

“Thank the nice man, Bug.” She had an overstuffed garbage bag in both arms and was pushing a wicker basket through the door with one flip-flop.

“Thank you.” The little girl suddenly went shy, popping one thumb into her mouth and reaching sideways through the air with her other hand for the leg of her mother’s track pants.

I nodded you’re welcome and picked up the little girl’s basket with one hand and the top of the bag of laundry with the other.

“Here, let me help you with that.”

The young woman let the bag go into my hand, relieved.

“Thank you so much. We just washed seven loads, didn’t we, Bug? My name is Kelly. This is my daughter Raylene.”

We shook hands in the air without touching, on account of all the laundry. Raylene sucked her thumb and avoided looking right at me, twisting her upper body in half circles, alternating from side to side. Her hair was exactly the same red-blonde shade as her mother’s. Same nose, too.

They were staying in the corner suite, right next to the parking lot off the highway. Kelly had the key for her motel room on a ring with the rest of her keys and an orange rabbit’s foot keychain. She held the wicker basket against
the stucco wall beside her door with one hip and unlocked the door, kicking it open with her knee.