This All Happened(72)

            4 I turn on the radio and a listener asks, When’s it a good time to move a bleeding heart? The gardening expert calls her my dear and it’s patronizing.

            Lydia has on a small, checked jacket with big mother-of-pearl buttons. She speaks of the salty beets you get in Toronto. She misses the beets. I tell her how I instantly fell for her and havent changed over two years of loving. That it’s a rare beauty that Lydia doesnt seem aware of. She’s not clear about what I mean, this unconscious beauty. That’s just it, I say. Youre unaware. But still she has drifted from me.

            I walk to the store for a newspaper. Wilf is there and asks if I see Twix bars. He is bending and pointing into the glass cabinet. I have never noticed this cabinet for chocolate bars. Wilf has big hands and I see that he is very big. He’s wearing tinted blue glasses. He is holding, by the neck, a guitar in a peculiar black case, like half a guitar.

            That’s an odd case.

            You play, Gabe?

            I play a little.

            He’s unzipping the case because I have remarked on it. Play us a tune.

            I appreciate his novelty. I remember there is a music school two doors up. As Marion passes me the paper I catch her quiet face.

            Me: No, I dont play in public.

            Just a little song.

            I couldnt,Wilf. It’s good you play.

            Marion says to Wilf, Do I know you? I feel like I know you. What’s your name?

            He tells her.

            Have I seen you on television?

            Wilf: I’ve been on television.

            That’s where it was then.

            As I leave Wilf encourages me to play in public.

            5 Lydia says her film is accepted in Vancouver. That’s great, I say. That is so great. And she gets a bottle of wine and we drive out to Flatrock to watch the water surge against the breakwater. She leaves in ten days. Gone for five. She says that after that we should take a trip to Corner Brook. To see my parents. To visit the cabin at Howley.

            Craig will be in Seattle. Just down the road.

            6 I’m sitting next to Boyd Coady in the bleachers. Boyd worked in a restaurant in Ontario, near Woodstock. Been working on rodeos since he was sixteen.

            Boyd: I saw Alice Cooper at the TSC. I used to hang around the university.

            Me: Oh, what did you study?

            Boyd: I never went there. I only hung around.

            His hair rich brown and parted in the centre. Well-takencare-of hair. His face scarred. Beady big brown eyes. A tattoo of a snake on his ring finger. He comes from a big family.

            There’s eighteen Coadys, he says. Same as the Roaches up on Freshwater.

            He points with his arm. I’ve got to make phone calls to Santo Domingo and Los Angeles tonight, he says. Family.

            The arc lamps glow on the backs of outfielders. I sit in the bleachers with the university team, which is arriving for the night game. It is September, they have begun a new term. Earl Quigley wants to take a group portrait. He has massive thighs.

            The home team behind ten to one.

            Boyd says, in an effort to lift them: It’s a tie game, let’s knock in a few runs.

            A woman sits on a legless folding chair. Down by the dugout Earl stares up at Boyd. There’s no need to be like that, Earl says to Boyd. And Boyd rises to meet him. There is history here.