Once You Break a Knuckle (6 page)

Summer got into swing. Beach parties, valediction, a gathering at the gravel pits where guys shotgunned cans of Hurricane like it was coming into style. Me and Bellows spent so much time in his garage that we missed the big happenings around the valley. Some kid wandered out of the gully at the edge of town. A retired highschool teacher signed up for the MMA Tough Guy tournament and shattered a student's nose. Us: we tinkered with the Camaro. Bellows flung me tools and crooned instructions, and for the first time in a really long time I thought life was going alright. At home, my old man asked me what the hell I'd been getting up to, and I just told him, —Tweaking that car, Dad, and he gave me the eye, as if to say,
Is that all?
The whole time, Ham drove loser laps along Invermere's main haul and we saw him with a puck
slut riding shotgun, a giant decal on the tailgate that said:
UR2SLO.

In July Bellows fired up the Camaro for its virgin run. His dad helped us with the guts but when we repainted the body Bellows made a point of it only being me and him. Afterward, the cobalt drew the eye like an athlete. We cruised around in that beater-on-the-rise. Bellows pushed a Queen album in the tape deck and we blared “Fat Bottomed Girls.” People gave us looks. At the only red light in town we sidled up beside some hicks in a raised pickup. Their bass drowned ours, but Bellows gave them the eye. They called us fags, and he revved the engine. Then the light greened and Bellows dropped the clutch straight to second and I made a paddling motion out the passenger window as we shot on by.

Near the end of summer me and Bellows swung by the lake, just bombing around, desperate to scrub up excitement. On the way, we bumped into his friend Charlie, wandering home with a bottle of Crown Royal. She crammed between us – athletic, brown haired, with nice teeth and a smile that showed her molars. At the lake, Bellows parked the Camaro under a street lamp and we hiked with Charlie to the water to circulate the booze. We sat on the sand with our shoes off, dipped our feet in the lake.

—
How much that car cost you? Charlie said. She gave Bellows a look, a once-over. I'd have traded anything to be in his shoes.

—
About two grand so far.

—
You ever wonder, she said, but didn't elaborate. She tapped her feet against Bellows'. Their knees brushed. The water swam with sediment. I had Bellows' shoulder wedged against mine but I thought I could smell Charlie – the scent of citrus fruit. I'd have given anything to switch places with Bellows.

Charlie dangled the Crown Royal between her thighs. —I can't drive stick, she said.

—It's just timing, Bellows said.

—You could show me.

—Yeah, if the time's right.

He never closed the deal. Charlie offered him more whiskey but he had to drive. Out of courtesy she offered me some and I tried to taste her lips on the bottle. Then we heard boys yell and tires screech, and when we looked at the Camaro there was Ham's truck and a bunch of guys scrambling out of it. Bellows straightened. I caught Charlie's eye and I could see that she wished I were not there. Bellows took off in a sprint. By the time he reached the parking lot the hicks had scratched
Fucking Fag
across the Camaro's hood with a key.

Ham was halfway inside his truck when Bellows heaved him to the asphalt and kicked him in the ribs, hard. He grabbed Ham's hair in one fist and cracked him in the nose, and cracked him again, and again. Other hicks climbed from their truck but one glare from Bellows made them wait it out. The whole time Ham blubbered like a kid being beaten. He was saying sorry. He was saying he was so sorry.

When Bellows finished, Ham's face was puffy, as if by bee stings. He went fetal. Bellows had blood and snot on his knuckles and teeth marks in the bone and one hand had swelled to the size of a ten-ounce boxing glove.

—Call someone, he told me.

—Bellows? I said.

—
Call someone
, he said again, this look in his eyes as if he meant
help me
.

Bellows' parents didn't take well to the news. In a few days his dad made plans for him to hash out his last school year in Manitoba, at that community for JWs. It was August. Town slowed to a drift. Summer jobs ended and kids hit the streets to meander their dwindling freedom. Me and Bellows did what small-town boys do. We got shitfaced on cheap vodka and pinged rocks off coal trains. We made half-hearted attempts to score girls. In the dirty hours of the morning, with the sun cresting the Rocky Mountains, we traipsed down the street and discussed anything except the fact of our parting.

In four months I'd be in the thick of my grad year and Bellows would join the Canadian Forces, take his knuckles overseas to the sandblasted Afghanistan dunes. There, some iron shrapnel would open his throat like a quartered grapefruit and he'd see God as things go blue. I'd graduate at the top of my class, and on the evening of convocation Bellows' old man would show up and pat us all on the shoulders. I'm still not sure why he came – to look for ghosts, maybe, or to hang on to something. At the end of the night he caught my arm and hissed, —You were
everything to him. A decade later I'd need a new electrical panel and the electrician turned out to be Ham, clean shaven and ready to make a name for himself. —Whoever woulda thought? he'd say to me.

But that's summer for you. Or, that's summer for me. These nights are short, and some evenings I sleep and wake and dream, here on this porch, until the sun lifts over the mountains. Bellows was the only guy who ever bared his teeth for me. Even my dad, rest him, never had the stones. When night recedes and the dawn turns cobalt, I shuffle inside and put music on to make it sound like there's somebody home. I pour myself a drink. There are probably a few things left unsaid between me and Bellows, but that ship, as my dad used to say, has run aground.

This is how me and him say goodbye: on the eve of his departure we climb into the Camaro and blaze around the gravel pits with the headlamps dark, and we bawl and laugh and hug and skid donuts until we've kicked up so much gravel it's like a sandstorm passing in our wake.

THE MATHEMATICS OF FRIEDRICH GAUSS

I've never been very good with my hands. Sure, I can swing a wood axe or heave on a pry bar, but ask me to pluck a suture or shuck an oyster and I start trembling like a man afraid. My doctor told me it could be nerve damage to the wrists – I got jackknifed in the birth canal – but I'm more inclined to believe I just never learned dexterity as a kid. My dad could've spun a few stories about how dangerous I am with a chop saw, or a hockey stick, or his prize fillet knife that once tasted the grit of human bone. It's why I became a math teacher. Clumsier than a stiff clutch, my dad used to say.

My wife knows the truth of it. She's the only reason I can walk into the bar here in Invermere and not get snickered at, the reason I can smoke salmon and pull-start a chainsaw, the reason I can, but rarely do, heft a firearm. She has red hair, darker than mine, but she knows how to wear it. In summer her skin turns statue-bronze and her veins push to the surface like a boy's. At rest, her curls tease the divot on her chin where, as a child, she barrelled
into a brass doorknob. She's got excess bone on her hip. One earlobe hangs a quarter-inch shorter than the other, and in the evenings when she thinks I'm dozing she'll stand naked before our bedroom mirror and examine her body's faults. It's as if she worries that somebody expects something more. But I've always loved her nicks and notches. I am a fan of her inadequacies. Like Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematics, I am in love with a woman who outclasses me by spades. Behind every great mathematician, and all that jazz.

It's 1994, the International Year of the Family, but my wife has left town to hike the Rocky Mountains. She's gone to muck her way to an unnamed peak southwest of the valley, where she'll pitch camp and listen to elk bugle below her and where she'll sip the homegrown chamomile tea she's packed among her clothes. It's a chance for her to get some distance from Invermere, B.C., from the people who mutter for hours about our scabby streets and all the driveways kibbled by snowplows. It's a chance for her to remember that the world exists somewhere else.

Me, I'm building a heliotrope. My son's idea. He drew a list of supplies and found a diagram in his science textbook, and now I'm expected to piece the thing together for him. There're two reasons he chose this device. First, because it's April, the end of term, and his grade four teacher, Barry Rogers – who everyone calls Wingnut on account of his ears – decided to go small-town-America and host a science fair. Second, because a heliotrope looks not unlike a laser rifle, my son wanted it mounted in
his tree fort. It's a survey device, actually, used to reflect light great distances. Gauss, my hero, invented the heliotrope and used it to triangulate the border of northern Germany. Nineteenth-century surveying involved men of uncertain sobriety waving paper lanterns in the night, and Gauss loathed to see things set aflame. The heliotrope's a simple design: tripod base with a mirror and two monocle lenses that you beam sunlight through, to make a signal that is visible for miles. The whole contraption affixes to what could pass for a telescope – the old, bronzy type that colonels sidearmed during the American Civil War.

My son and I are not alike, at least not physically. Colleagues crack jokes about mailmen and the uncertainty of my loins and I do my best to not let suspicion eat me. I've got fibrous red hair and a jaw tapered like a rugby ball. In my prime, I once benched a hundred and forty-four pounds, which, within acceptable variation, I've weighed since grade twelve. My son, though, he's got a working man's brown hair and this scar from earlobe to eyebrow where, as a toddler, he sliced himself on a nailhead. Takes after his mother, and that's alright, except for his disposition toward fighting shows, which he comes by quite honestly from me. Each day he and the neighbour's boys blitz home to watch the Power Rangers on my forty-two-inch rear-projection TV. This happens at three-thirty, Monday through Friday. I bring them some Coke they split amongst themselves and a bowl of dill pickle chips. On commercial breaks they gossip as though running out of time: there's a new kid in town whose dad's a cop;
the Cooper children wear patched-up jeans because their parents can't even afford heat; some teenager got arrested on the playground for selling parsley to the elementary schoolers as dope. And I sit in the kitchen and eavesdrop. I do it because sometimes it's hard for a dad to understand his boy, but also out of loneliness and a sense that nobody has friends like those we cause mischief with as kids. It's a chance to feel my own childhood, a chance to think about just how unhappier I could be.

I've heard misery skips a generation. My dad was a heavy-duty mechanic who got his thumb jammed in the door of a Peterbilt Class 8. It took two miles for the driver to notice him running alongside, if you're to believe what my dad had to say. He called that kinked thumb
the rachet
because it tended to buckle out of joint in fifteen-degree stutters. Gimped or not, he was one hell of a mechanic. Once, he used crochet thread and two bulldog clips to jury-rig a Volkswagen Beetle that'd snapped its accelerator hitch. Another time, on the highway to the Prairies, I watched him repair our Ranger's exhaust pipe with leftover ringwire and a good helping of machismo. I'm pretty sure he wished I'd wear a boilersuit alongside him, but handiness with machinery is one marble I did not shoot. Dad used to say I'm a few knockouts short of a punch, whatever that means.

I'm writing a biography on Gauss, because I like to think our lives are similar. Gauss's father was a stonemason named Gerhard who planned for his son to wield a beechwood mallet and slop his hands with mortar. Gerhard dreamed of founding a man-and-boy masonry
called Steinbrecher und Sohn. In the evenings, he imagined, he'd drink
Roggenkorn
and bicker with Gauss over
geschäft
. That's all the German I speak. No pictures remain of old Gerhard, but with a name like that you can bet safely on a square jaw, handlebar cheekbones, and an ocular ridge with more angles than the Grand Canyon. Gauss stood five-foot-two and stocky like someone accustomed to hauling brick. A workman's build. His father's son. In letters, his colleagues always mention Gauss's blue eyes. Portraits of him show an unremarkable, squat man with chops a frontiersman could abide. His nose is stout and curved at the end like a knuckle. One thick eyebrow arches, tantalizingly, and he smiles like a man who has discovered a secret we're all dying to know but don't quite have the nerve to ask after.

Anyway, it's the end of April here in Invermere, which means, among other things, that the frost has turned to dew and the lake has thawed and somebody has won a couple hundred bucks guessing the day the ice went out. It means evening light shallowing toward the horizon, the mountains casting long shadows across the valley. Kids, like my son, sense the approach of summer and get antsy from a winter spent too long indoors. Teenagers discard their shirts too early. Firepits are re-dug and lawn chairs trawled from toolsheds and for the first time in months the neighbourhood smells like woodsmoke and hotdogs roasted over open flame. Wives complain about too many coat hangers unbent to sausage spits, but not much can be done about that.

I'm in my backyard with a couple empties and the salvaged scraps of a weathervane. I've got a grade four science textbook spreadeagle on a cinderblock. My wife's toolbox yawns atop our picnic table, red and blastworn like a fire hydrant. This year, as I said, is the International Year of the Family, but my son is out of town on a class field trip to Banff. I'm building him a heliotrope anyway, because I'm bored and because I'm a good father. The sun has slunk toward the Purcell Mountains and its light scatters through the planks of my lumber fence. My wife built the fence – it took her a whole evening just to trowel holes for the posts. I offered to help, but she said I was a schoolteacher, not a fence builder, so I stayed indoors and drafted lesson plans and watched her through the slatted bedroom blinds. She wore a muscle shirt with sweat-stained ribs and jeans faded in great smiles at the thighs. Each time she shovelled, her lips peeled over her gums and I imagined the breath that trilled between her teeth. Back then, I knew the sounds she could make. Periodically, I mixed rye and Coke and gave it to my son to ferry out to her. She told him: —You could show your dad a thing or two about how to treat a lady. He repeated that line around the house for days. He was four years old then, and wouldn't have known what she meant. Nor would he have noticed the tension each time he said it, or the way my wife cringed like a woman who had come just shy of having the life she dreamed of as a girl.