The Man Game (32 page)

He couldn't argue with that because he felt a little winded. Okay, said Litz in a lesser voice. Then don't leave him, but come with me now.

She kissed him on the cheek. Oh, Litz.

Wha—? he said. What?

Stop here, she said.

What? He spied left-right.

She said: Careful for that branch.

Then she edged him back against a mossy pine and kissed him on the cheek. Pomegranate. Between the outlines of so many trees. The trees made an army in the darkness on a night of intermittent snow. Behind the chirruping of nearby raccoons Litz could hear the New Year's Eve band beat their logs. Their rhythm nearly competed with the blood pounding in his ears. Pounding so hard it numbed his kissed cheek.

A man is known by his actions, she said. Let your actions be natural. Do not think aboot how you look to others. Recall how difficult it can be to follow your movements when you look in a mirror as you scissor your moustache. When you are guided and not leading your actions, that's trouble. Be at ease with yourself, Litz. This is who you are. Don't guide yourself, but allow your actions to speak for you.

I don't kumtuks, he said. I won't kumtuks. I want to … how do I say it, I want … to make love to you.

She sighed with pity for him. If we made love there'd be nothing left. Tell me why you feel this way?

Oh, Molly, he said, jumping at the chance to explain himself. Don't you know. The way I look at your. And I'm wanting you. Missing you. I think aboot you no matter what I'm doing. Wouldn't you like to be my wife? Wouldn't you like to lie down with me now? You and me, right now?

No, she said, simply, and without unnecessary cruelty.

But he was crushed. There were plenty of women who loved to do it in the woods. In coming to the dance tonight, Litz had very much hoped that Molly would be one of them. Lovemaking in the woods was one of Litz's specialties, where the fears vanished and the entirety of his passions and prowess was available to him in all sorts of ways. Mrs. Litz had married him not for the love he showed her in the bedroom of Wood's, but for the richer expression of it she saw when he took her in the woods. Litz was instinctually drawn to women who loved to do it in the woods. That's why he expected Molly to already be on top of him. For some women, that's what the forest was for, private discussions with men. Litz assumed by his popularity with women that he must be attractive. Molly was defying this expectation, but he didn't believe her. Litz believed that Molly wanted it, but couldn't admit it. Molly wasn't a frigid thing. She bit her bottom lip, very on purpose, and batted her eyelashes.

And here was Molly with Litz in the woods, on New Year's Eve, no less. With a kiss on his cheek, she dipped away without so much as a wrinkle on her skirts.

Where are you going? he said.

I have to go back to the dance again, Litz, she said.

What? Again? So soon?

I just realized it's almost midnight. Sammy will be expecting me.

Almost midnight …? I thought it was … what time is it?

He kept working to get his erection down as he watched her subsume into the terminality of 1886. Seeking if nothing else then at least to kiss her while she sought to kiss her beloved husband on the big fat midnight. He couldn't even bear to go back and say a proper klahowya to Clough. He walked, instead of anywhere else, home.

Back at the portable Rústico saloon, Clough was still marinating in the news he'd just learned. I'll be damned, he said as he rubbed his entire face. I need a drink. I said I need a
drink
.

He opened the entrance to the hideout, a mere silhouette of her former husband. At god-knows-what hour Litz stood in the doorway and didn't move farther. He was late enough that the wildlife was already uncurled and waiting in secret shades for food. Late enough that 1887's first sun was rising behind his back. She couldn't even see her husband's expression. He, on the other hand, could see her well enough, purple across the face. She couldn't even muster the energy to bawl him out. Litz tried to react. His eyes were burnt-out, hardly open, as from opium addiction. He walked over to the bed. He stared at Pisk asleep. He swallowed. His wife looked up at him with wet, sorrowful eyes. One eye was swollen and bloody. He sat down on a canewood chair next to the bed and unlaced his boots and she shifted to the middle of the bed without waking Pisk. Litz lay down in the warmth she left behind. The ceiling beams above his head were spotted by a black mould. And he turned, held her until they somehow found the energy to fall asleep in the cold sunshine through the door he forgot to shut.

EIGHT

When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim.

–
RENÉ GIRARD

When the Litzes awoke it was already evening, January 1, 1887. Night in the forest. Above the treeline the clouds were a perfect ceiling aside from one small hole, as if made from a flame, breaking it open to show a view of the deep black universe where the stars hang to dry. One dead tree, as dead as any star, exhaled a thin trail of smoke like off a forgotten cigarette next to a window. At the base of the dead tree, the shanty cabin. Food cooking. The stovepipe fitted into the trunk of this tree. The room was warmed to the smell of fresh Canadian bacon, a dozen eggs, griddlecakes, coffee on the stove. Pisk was frying up breakfast for dinner.

Litz separated himself from his wife, making sure to avoid upsetting the food when he cold-cocked Pisk hard across the jaw. Rolled him to the floor, pushed him out the door for the last straight-up fist fight of their lives. They stood with fists raised. Pacing around, trading blows. Pisk defended himself enough to take what he had coming to him. Once Litz had him down on the dirt, the fight turned into punishment.

'The fuck you think you are?

Pisk blacked out when Litz smacked him across the head, got his ear split in half, and his nose broke flat when he fell to the ground. Litz knocked him around a bit more until his partner was beside the door, falling limply against their home like a cord of firewood that had toppled over.

Litz went back inside and poured three cups of coffee, gave one to his wife and brought the other two back outside, slapped
Pisk awake with a soaked shirt and helped get him to his feet. The men cleaned up together at the creek then sat on logs until they'd finished the dregs of their coffee before going back inside where Litz's wife served them up breakfast for dinner.

Afterwards, she filled the net with the dishes and went down to the creek and slung the net under the running water. She hooked it to a peg so it wouldn't get dragged away— nature's dishwasher—and went back to the shack where two bastards treated her cuts. That night in bed—Pisk against the wall, Litz in the middle, his wife on the outer edge of the mattress—no one got much sleep.

They thought about what could not be said.

She wondered why she still believed she would be happier if permitted to sleep in the middle.

Litz mentally repeated a shoulder roll he'd done earlier in the night, going through the moment again and again and gauging when he'd reacted against when he should have reacted.

Pisk asked himself why he agreed to so much pain in life. He wanted something to happen that would change the course of his fate. His problem, he figured, was he avoided success. He was cruel when he should be kind, laughed at mercy, and feared women. His hands could break a cow. He kicked open doors. Opium never once made him drowsy. Metabolically he could take anything. Not long ago he was a boy. How did he go from being a boy to being this? He'd agreed to try the game—why? Because Molly was beautiful and it was impolite to say no way. Imagine you turn a rock into an eel. You turn a mosquito into a monk. You take mud and moss from the forest floor and you shape that into a man. That's how he felt. No one ever taught Pisk the words for when you had good feelings. All he knew was that the man game was something more than Litz or himself. Above all else, from this day forward he would obey the game.

Since Dr. Langis's moratorium on prescription renewals for laudanum, RH Alexander and his wife had decided on scheduling
private room in the back of Ming's, a popular den that smelled of cold sweat, coffee, and human feces (after the first puff you didn't even notice). Pale inebriated Chinamen in silk booties, long smocks, and porkpie hats were at your disposal. They cooked your opium on the tip of a wooden pin and fit your lips to the end of the pipe to inhale its smoke. The pin the Chinamen used was beautifully carved. Dragons clutched in their talons the top of a scored poppy bulb. Another pin was silver decorated by an inset jade leaf. A ball of opium the size of pea was jabbed on the pinpoint and held over a candle until the stuff went from a defecatory brown to a limpid honey yellow. You inhaled. Who could say no to such a thing? They were both quite sure this was the ideal way to say goodnight to the first day of the new year.

I can see why they sometimes refer to them as Celestials, said Alexander.

… China-ese, said his wife, sleepily.

Because here I am deep in a basement and I can see the stars as clearly as if I were floating in a canoe on a lake, looking up.

Mrs. Alexander gazed up at the ceiling with her husband, wondering if her mind would conjure up the same zodiac as his. Yes, she said, I see it.

But he was already asleep. And so was she.

They awoke moments later from vast dreams. The Alexanders lay together on a long, wide, very flat sofa carved with scaly dragons, poppies, and pyres. Seeing them stir, a Chinaman silently put the pipe back to RH's lips and dropped a melty nugget off his pin and into the pipe's glass bowl where it was hot enough to vaporize with just a little more candleheat and RH's deep inhalation. He passed the pipe to his wife, who accepted China's gift to the imagination, leaned into the candle, and sucked the flame towards the syrupy shag. She held the world inside her lungs for twenty seconds before exhaling.

That fool Langis—he was a clown. This was real medication. This was poetry. This was the tabernacle. This was the mind's histrionic death scene. Opium was a theatre as yet
invisible to the naked eye, a silent squall of profound and blissful drama.

Only China knows how to sleep, said RH.

That's the word I was trying to remember, his wife said. Sleep, she said as if the word meant ecstasy.

The walls were thick. RH didn't feel anything and the only thing he heard was the ringing in his ears. RH was on the other side of the helix. Beside him, his wife seemed preoccupied with swallowing something perpetually in the back of her throat. His wife was the tongue on the owl of time, licking minutes. Despite them, the temperature in Vancouver dropped two degrees and made all the nothings sound more succinct.