The Man Game (18 page)

At the time, without any knowledge of the history of the game and how it was played, there was no way for Minna and I to guess how long the fight would last or how it was segmented. Not that it mattered. I was intrigued. Minna looked far from bored. She was getting giddy. I was trying to make sense of it all. In the time since we arrived in the backyard the house had caved even deeper into its foundations. The yard was looking much worse also. The audience had ruined the perimeters and the players were gouging and trampling the rest. The unmown grass now lay irregularly flattened, similar to morning hair, from all the footsteps and wrestling marks. I wondered if not far underneath the sod there was a layer of wet mud, swamp gum, or some other liquid that the house was sinking into. The grass was like a tarp laid over top. Maybe not a tarp, a trap. The lawn was whorled crop circle–like, and was balding at the centre where Ken and Silas were at the moment completely hammerlocked. The situation passed for wrestling motions before it stepped up to aggressive moves—I overheard names like the Wheelbarrow, Spanish Layover, the Pisk. Every time I prepared to wince back from an ugly scene the struggle transformed into something calmer. So I wasn't convinced it was a fight, but I couldn't see how it was staged, either. For one thing, if it was some kind of sort of performance piece, Ken's shins looked too gruesome. He really chewed them up on a fall after being trapped knee over knee. He fell hard, and looked angrily at himself, and the one named Silas apologized. But the audience seemed to think Silas had scored big.

I watched this game unfold with an increasing sense of the strange. Even the long intermittences when the players just stood bent over and caught their breath seemed unusual. I felt more and more irrelevant.

I liked that move where it was kind a jazzy, a dance routine like you see in old movies, said Minna.

You mean the one where he dragged him around by the neck
{see
fig. 5.1
}
?

Yeah.

Even though just after that he swung around and tried to hit him in the face?

Funny, yeah.

They don't ever seem to actually hurt each other on purpose, I said. So I'm puzzled.

I think they want to make it look like they want to hurt each other, but really they actually don't.

Then she went down on her knees. Struggling, she pushed her hands through the side pockets of her high-altitude camping bookbag, looking for the good shit. Finally there it was. She stood up with the paraphernalia in hand. Made from cedar and much the same size as a tin for lozenges, the paraphernalia looked solid but was in fact hollow. Indians on the West Coast used to make clothes from cedar; that's how light it was. She flipped the object over in her hands, levered the top open along a joint, and shook out a cigarette-sized brass straw from where it was kept inside a smooth pipeline bored into the wood. She fiercely tapped one end of the brass straw into the larger
hollow where the pot was stowed, plugging a hoot of grass into the end of it. She'd bought the whole package on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo from an Indian kid who carved them on a street corner beside a fast food restaurant and sold them for fifteen dollars each, including the brass pipe made from plumbing parts. He'd carve an orca on it for you, but that cost twenty dollars extra. She had the thirty-five-dollar version. I called it her one-hit wonder. True that Minna gave me a hard time, or it felt like it, and I didn't have to take it, but it's true that I did. I was going through an experience. I was, like many, in search of a girl.

FIGURE 5.1
The Spanish Layover; an early study

Calabi's commentary: A sympathetic opponent will retreat with you as quick as a hound, but if you've hooked a feisty player he will treat you like a Sunday fisherman who's caught a live one.

Toronto was on his way down Hastings Street towards his destiny: The Calabi & Yau Bakeshoppe. With him travelled not only hunger but also secrets, some his own, some he'd been given, including another message from Molly Erwagen to the exiles he foresaw bumping into any day now.

He weighed his options. He glanced in the general vicinity of some other Indians, who paid him explicitly no attention. Would they kill him if he said hello? He motioned. They huddled more closely under hat rims and their Hudson's Bay blankets. A pipe's fume rose from their mass, like a wandering-away ghost. He shrugged, supposed that yes, they would kill him.

A murmur turned into a yowl upside his stomach. A Calabi&Yau pastry would soothe his lonely spirit, or at the very least his hunger.

He hardly followed the planks down Columbia Street, for the seasonal dry spell left him mud-free options.

A horse clopped by, covered to the stiffles and withers in the muck from New Westminster road, followed by the dusty brougham of an eastern tycoon, seen better days than this. He waved his hat to Toronto and Toronto nodded back.

Coming from the side street, the black hat and pink face was unmistakably Vicars, and beside him his friend
AE Terry Berry, a spirited man. Vicars was a bit poltroonish himself, as Daggett might say. They walked with a tree climber's gait, for sure, all bowed, knock-kneed, and rolled ankles. Toronto wondered if his impressions of others in any way reflected how they thought of him. Was his face as obvious, revealing all his weak intentions, and did he walk with that much fear of the earth?

It was a conversation without Toronto having to say a word. Vicars talked enough for everybody. Terry Berry was good at agreeing. Eventually little caches of white spittle caught at the sides of Vicars's mouth, lowering his air of respectability another notch. He was tired of the woods, and he and Terry Berry were going to open a dry goods warehouse to compete against the Oppenheimer brothers. Quit all this backbreaking work with no security and the Chinese fiftycenting them at every step. Throw the axes and saws aside and forget that life and settle down to something safe and presentable that you can count on into your old age. No man can log his entire life unless he dies early because of it. Besides, the city could use another food distributor, and if there's one thing Vicars knows it's business.

Toronto wished them well and carried on his way, hoping to lose no more time. From behind the wide stump of a giant red cedar, he saw an exhale of smoke.

Klahowya, Toronto, called out a neighbour on the opposite side of the street, hand up, armpit exposed. Couldn't remember his name at the moment, but he was a Greek with thick, bright-white front teeth and an even temper. He set his ice cream cart down the block from Red & Rosy's General Store where bananas hung in green-yellowing bunches alongside grey and brown grouse and the bodies of fresh deer, antlers aimed to the sidewalk, twisting in the breeze ever so slightly on their knotted hind legs.

Toronto, it is you, said the Greek, shaking his friend's hand. Ah, it's almost nearly winter, so what a I do? The Greek looked at his ice cream cart, watching a drizzle of melted ice fall from a bottom corner of the sweating casket. In my home,
he told Toronto, I writer for newsprint, yes? I write many news, many news. Then I must leave. English, ah, not so much, not for me. English is sk
oo
kum, yes? Ha ha. Nobody pay me chickamin to write English, ha ha. Hm. I still get chickamin with my hands, he said, holding out their calluses, you kumtuks, Toronto? My hands.

Yes, Toronto understood him.

Any way to get chickamin, the Greek added. Yesterday I get mugged. You believe me? I who got so few chickamin. No chickamin to spare. Mugger mug me. You believe me, Toronto? Ah, such a pity.

Seen the mugger's face?

No, only black garment. Little man. Small, thin, like insect. Great big knife in hand. Sharp thing. What he said do, I do. For me, what other choice? Life it is misery, you agree? Sure you no want ice cream?

Okay.

Okay now, ha ha, that more like it. He opened the lid of his casket and rolled a nice big scoop of spumoni for the Indian and dropped it into a waffle cone.

Klahowya, Toronto, the Greek said as Toronto walked away, ice cream in hand. Raising the nickel in his fingers, the Greek called out to him: Don't forget you-me: billiards.

Klahowya, said Toronto and waved goodbye. He nodded his head and left the Greek to his day. He walked for a while trying to figure out the size of the world.

From a Chinese breezeway leading to a handmade noodle shop in the alley, a hand yoinked Toronto into the shadows.

Whaa-a? cried Toronto, happy at least to have spilled the cone.

Shh, don't say nothing. Shit, brother, you got spumoni all over me.

The shadowy surprise came with a ripe smell of longterm uncleanliness, an odour and voice he easily recognized; once able to retrieve his composure and his hat, he saw none other than Pisk.

A stranger limped by without noticing them stowed in the slippery, smelly, bowelly dark breezeway between one Chinese cookout and another, right in the noodle hole. Farther into the darkness, Toronto made out a second figure, doubtless it was Litz. Who else? Pisk dug into his pocket and brought out an unsealed envelope. He handed it to Toronto, said: Can you mail this?

Toronto looked it over. The letter inside almost fell out when he flipped the envelope to see if there was a stamp or address anywhere on it. All it said was: For Ma Pisk.

He nodded. I can mail it for you, he said. This was the same kind of meeting he'd had with the men when he passed on Molly Erwagen's message.

Any news from your side? said Pisk. From Mrs., ah, Molly …?

Says she can meet this afternoon, said Toronto.

This aftern—, ok
ay
. Pisk smiled and chucked Toronto on the shoulder the way a man thanks another man whom he owes more than words could ever express.

Toronto smiled at Pisk, flapped the letter in the air to let him know it was in safekeeping, and humbly fled the noodle hole, back onto the street, where he pocketed the envelope, attention once again aimed at the Calabi & Yau Bakeshoppe, within sight, and more importantly, within smelling distance.

There were no boardwalks in Little Tokyo, as Powell Street was often called, not like there were on some of the other streets. Here there were only a few scattered boards to jump to one by one over the mud, and muddy doorways no matter how tidy you were. Nevertheless, fronting the Calabi & Yau Bakeshoppe was a fine bit of boardwalk, not to mention three solid stone steps leading to the glass door framed in gorgeous maple scallops.

The brass doorbell ding-dingled as it always did when the door swung open, and Toronto fully whiffed the exalted aroma of Calabi & Yau's freshly baked pastries. Calabi was behind the counter as usual, and raised his eyes to acknowledge Toronto before he returned to his present customer, a shoeless kid counting out filthy pennies.

Ah, son, you are one penny short, said Calabi. Nine cents. What shall we do?

The boy looked up at the baker with uncomprehending anxiety.

Yau walked over to the glass trays where the Calabi&Yaus were kept and the boy followed him. Calabi tonged a chocolate and banana Calabi&Yau into a little foldable pastry box. The little boy was wordless, soundless, afraid of his own hunger. Calabi held the tongs aloft in his crossed arms and looked at the kid, but the kid didn't know about jokes like this, and Calabi squinted. He tonged in a blackberry Calabi&Yau with cream cheese icing then swiftly tied the box shut with twine and handed it to the boy. Last penny on me, said Calabi and winked. Ding-dingle.

Klahowya, Toronto, best wishes, welcome welcome. How is your day?

Klahowya, Toronto, called out Yau from the back where he was soaked in sweat from sliding pallets of pastry into the Dutch oven.

Hi, hi, klahowya. Good.

Calabi took out his kerchief and started to polish off the kiddie fingersmudges from the glass sides of the pastry counter. Clever child, yes? he said.
Al
ways one penny short. Ah, now, sir, how is Mrs. Erwagen?

Toronto nodded. Busy, he said. Mr. Erwagen is o-kay. Wife o-kay, too. Keep busy.

Ah, busy, said Calabi, winking. He was crouched beside Toronto and had to stop polishing the glass and look almost straight up at him to make his point: Many lady I see—busy. So busy. I do not see Mrs. Erwagen busy like other lady.