Tilt

Alan Cumyn

GROUNDWOOD BOOKS
HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS
TORONTO BERKELEY

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This edition published in 2011 by
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Toronto, ON M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Cumyn, Alan
Tilt / Alan Cumyn.
eISBN 978-1-55498-173-1
I. Title.
PS8555.U489T54 2011           jC813'.54           C2011-902085-8

Cover photograph by Media Bakery
Design by Michael Solomon

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

The new girl came upon him unexpectedly. He was alone in the dark parking lot behind the auto-glass shop where nobody went at night except for him. It was hard to explain what he was doing. He was developing a twisting kick that involved heaving himself into the air with a broom handle. The kick part was coming along, but the landing needed work.

He was picking little asphalt bits out of his knee when she happened by.

“Hey,” she said, not the least bit startled. Perhaps she hadn't seen the kick. Still, he was a male in a shadowy back alley developing his own secret martial art, and many girls would have been frightened out of their boots.

She wasn't wearing boots. She was wearing flip-flops that went
thwack thwack
with every step, and a pair of ordinary jeans and a light windbreaker. She was taller than him and big-shouldered. Her hair stood up at odd angles as if she hadn't slept in forty-eight hours and had then been electrocuted. It was red tonight, as far as he could see.

Janine. Janine Igwash.

Janine Igwash walked straight past him, then climbed the fence, which was eight feet high and topped with rusted barbed wire. No hesitation, gone so fast he wondered if he hadn't simply imagined her. Yet another absurdity of being sixteen. New girls bigger than him with weird hair appeared in the darkness and slithered up fences like feral ghosts.

He liked the sound of that:
feral ghosts
. What did it mean? He took out his notebook and wrote in the darkness,
she grazed my spine like a feral ghost
.

Maybe the beginning of a poem? He flipped back a page to
the perfect jump shot begins in the soul/sole
. He could just read it by the dull light from the back wall of the auto-glass.

He imagined Janine Igwash walking past him again, only this time he was reading from his notebook. And instead of saying, “Hey,” she said, “What's that?” Then he looked up at her coolly and said, “I keep track of my thoughts from time to time.” Then she sat cross-legged beside him and he read to her snippets of his thoughts such as the one about the jump shot. And she said, “Really?” As if she'd never thought of it that way. And why would she have?

“My name is Stan,” he said to her in this revised version happening in his head. “Most of the kids in school, they call me Stanley, but really it's Stan. I was the final man cut from the JV squad last year but this year I'm going to be a starter.”

He got up then, picked up the basketball he had left in the shadows, bounced it twice then launched a beautiful arcing shot at the hoop he'd personally nailed, with backboard, to the old pine tree leaning up against the fence.
Swish.

Out loud, to no one, to the feral ghost of Janine Igwash, he said, “With shots like that, I am going to be a starter.”

Then he limped over to the spot on the fence where the girl had disappeared just minutes before. He pulled himself up the chain link. There was even a space in the rusty barbed wire that he could see would be almost easy to slither through. He peered into the darkness through the leaves.

She had just arrived late last year. It must have been hard for her coming into the school knowing nobody. Especially with a name like Igwash.

He was gazing across a backyard. Janine's? A light snapped on in an upstairs bedroom. Someone's shadow against the curtains. Spiky hair. Maybe she was about to undress, her silhouette black against the white screen. It was hard to see through the leaves, but it sure looked like she was tugging at her shirt.

He climbed down. His knee felt better. He snapped a few high kicks without the broom handle, then punched the air six times rapid-fire, a quick exhalation with each strike. Then he retrieved the basketball again and let loose a turnaround jumper without looking, entirely by feel. The ball hit the back of the rim, then the front, then the back, then spun out and bounced, the sound echoing down the dark alley.

The perfect jump shot begins in the soles of the feet. It moves like a wave through the calves and the thighs up to the hips and along the spine to the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand and out the fingertips, a natural stroke as at ease in the universe as an ocean wave that curls and falls. Easier than breathing. Truer than thought.

Stan liked that.
Truer than thought.
He bounced the ball seven more times, pounding a single word into his brain —
starter, starter, starter
— then glanced again through the darkness at what he thought might be Janine Igwash's bedroom window.

—

Home in darkness. Stan turned on the porch light as he slid past the squeaky screen door.

“Mom?” He kicked off his sneakers, left them with his basketball and broomstick in the hall closet. The kitchen was dark, too. “Mom?”

She was sitting in the den with three remotes on her lap and a glass of wine on the telephone table. The TV was dark. As soon as he entered, she thrust the remotes aside and picked up her wine glass. A binder lay open at her feet and the room smelled like work — like the worry of it.

She snapped it shut, as if she didn't want him to see something.

Budget Contingencies,
the binder said.

“These two,” Stan said, picking up the gray remote and the fat black one, “you never need to touch. Just leave them in the cabinet. Maybe I should label them?”

“How was your day, sweetie?” The red wine left a small line on top of her lipstick that he wished she would wipe off.

“The only one you need to use is this one.” He held the skinny gray remote in front of her eyes at a reasonable focal distance. “And the only button you need to press is this one.” He showed her the AUX button. Then he pressed it. Nothing. “Unless somebody has been hitting buttons randomly. Then you have to press the Satellite button.”

She pretended to be watching. “Did you get something to eat?”

“I had the chicken salad, and I fed Lily, too. This button here. It says ‘satellite.' We only have to press that once in our lives, then never again. The remote remembers.”

His mother picked up the binder and began to flip through densely printed pages.

“The remote remembers,” he said again, in case it might make a difference. He pressed the Auxiliary button and the TV sprang to life. A couple danced frantically in feathered spandex.

“There's nothing on anyway,” she said. “I was just waiting for Gary.”

Gary, Gary, Gary. Stan turned off the dancers. He picked up the two extra remotes and put them in the back of the TV cabinet.

“Is he coming over or something?” It was hard to keep the curdle from his voice.

“He said he was going to call. I'm not going out. I have an eight o'clock tomorrow morning.” Stan's mother finished her wine and sat in her very still way, as if inviting the mossy green of the sofa to slowly take her over. Her hand remained on the binder, but her eyes were glassy with fatigue.

Stan walked into the kitchen and performed his own meditation in front of the open fridge. The carton of organic grapefruit juice stared back. He pulled it out and looked for a date:
26 Sep
. No wonder it had tasted fuzzy that morning.

Water at the tap. Stan twisted to drink. When he straightened up, his mother's phone rang.

“Oh, it's you,” Stan heard her say from the other room in that girly voice she only used when talking to Gary.

Up the stairs. Stan practiced walking with his weight channeled to the outside of each foot to transfer the force of every step smoothly, like a soundless wave. Step number five was impossibly squeaky. But if the footfall were in the exact resonance of the loose board . . . 

“Well, you always have the same idea,” his mother said downstairs.

Into Lily's room. The floor too had a resonance he tried to feel with his feet. Little girl sleeping, her wild hair everywhere on the pillow. She was clutching Mr. Strawberry by the neck and already clenching her jaw.

Stan turned out her light and she opened her eyes.

“Is Mommy going out?”

“No. Did you have a pee?”

“Did she tell you she wasn't going out?”

“I want you to have a pee.”

“I don't need to.”

“Yes, you do. Get up.” Stan pulled at her wrist. She hit him feebly on the arm with Mr. Strawberry.

He marched her into their mother's bathroom. It still reeked of Chanel from some days before when Lily had run amok. A gift from Gary.

“I hate going in here,” she said.

“Just plug your nose and go.” Stan waited outside the door and tried not to look at the unmade bed, the scattered clothes. Gary's toothbrush for some reason lay on the bedside table.

“Nothing is coming!” Lily announced.

“Concentrate!”

The thin layer of dust on the dresser, on the closet mirror, on the abstract male nude hanging tilted over the bed.

“It's not coming!”

His mother's footfalls shuddered the stairs. How could such a skinny woman make so much noise? When she thudded into the bedroom, her blouse was already half off.

“Oh, you're here,” she said. But the blouse came all the way off anyway. Black lace bra.

Stan studied his toes. She slid open the closet door and flipped through her dresses as if they were files in a cabinet.

“Lily is peeing,” he said.

“It's not coming!”

Stan's mother stepped out of her slacks, which stayed squatted on the floor in front of the closet.

Stan escaped to his bedroom. Even with the door closed and the pillow over his head he still heard Lily say, “But you said you weren't going out!” He plugged in his music. Gain/Loss sang,
Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna do?
straight into his ears in the darkness over and over until the house was still.

Music off. Lily made little unasleep huffing-chuffing breathing noises in the next bedroom. He hadn't heard the door close, but his mother was gone. All still and dark.

With his eyes shut he imagined himself on the tryout court, all last year's returning JV stars there, Coach Lapman watching, everyone watching. He caught the ball and leaned left, went right then
bing!
On the spot, straight up like a human spring . . . the wave moving through him, the spin of the ball, the arc in the air.
Swish
. Nothing but net. Nothing but window. Silhouette. Dark against light. The twisting shot . . . and the twist of Janine's arms as she tugged up the T-shirt . . .  he hadn't looked and yet the black and white danced in his mind . . . her dark bra, the points of her hair, the fall of her breasts . . . despite it all the show went on as soon as he closed his eyes.

On and on it went.