“I didn’t think of it,” he said.“And I’ll tell you why. I’d just moved into my new house and I’d assumed I could load my new garage any way I saw fit.”
Now, along with tone, he dripped attitude — and we’d reached that moment of no return; although no finger pointing, chest puffing, or yelling had yet occurred, we’d carried the confrontation to the next level in all the subtle ways.
With that thought, a trio of observations entered my mind. The first was this: in the space of one minute I’d gone from sharing a special time with my daughter to an episode of senseless friction with a stranger.The second was this: of course the moron in front of me had given the heavy bag full consideration, immediately thinking, Son-of-a-fucking bitch, we’ve just moved next to a Neanderthal. He just plain didn’t like me — and the heavy bag was a part of that dislike.And the third observation, the only one to give me any real pleasure, was this: the new jerk wasn’t being the least bit accommodating, so I wasn’t going to be, either.
I walked back to my garage and the heavy bag and took a swing at it — half-heartedly but with all the acting skill I could muster. I paused and cocked an ear towards his side of the wall. Nothing. I shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem bad enough to be concerned about. I couldn’t hear any movement at all.”
“That is not how you were hitting it earlier,” he said. “I stood outside your door and listened for some time.”
I’ll bet he had.“Maybe the music’s vibrations made it worse.” “Yes, the music,” he said, grimacing.
He’d rapped on the garage door as “Baby’s On Fire” poured out of the stereo, with its bass line pounding and Brian Eno sneering,“Baby’s on fire/and all the laughing boys are bitching/waiting for photos/of the part that’s so bewitching.” And now, as he looked at me, a boorish thug in my smelly exercise rags, and Rachel, the dishevelled match girl forced into brutish sport by her evil father, he allowed his anger or condescension (or some other emotion that pushed him into the territory of poor judgement) to take over. Or maybe, as a community college English teacher spending half his life in the world of fiction, he’d existed under the delusion that he kept rank with Callahan and Mailer and Hemingway and could, as they had on occasion, let his fists fly, punctuating his definitive statements with four-knuckled exclamation marks.
“Come here and keep your eye on the lawnmower,” he said, brushing past me.We switched spots and he stood in front of the bag, eyeing a soft spot in the canvas that hovered to his right at shoulder height.
Even then, I might have said, “Look. Why don’t you just move everything to the other side of the garage? Right now. It’ll only take about half an hour, and I’ll help.” I’d thought about saying that — I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.The hate was already there.
Weir wound up, throwing his fist as if he were throwing a pitch, and I started wincing before he made contact. To the uninitiated, the spot he aimed for would seem insubstantial, almost cloudlike, but even the most worn areas of a heavy bag do what they’re made to do, and that’s stop a fist suddenly, absorb energy, and return it; hence the wraps and gloves. So when Weir’s bare knuckles hit their target, his unsupported and unsuspecting wrist turned sharply, bending his hand in on itself. An unfamiliar sound issued from around the bag, not a poop or a whump, but a POP, and Weir bent over, his upper teeth instantly digging into his lower lip. He clutched his hand to his stomach.
That, I suppose, allowed me my next opportunity to be the bigger man, to rush over and show concern despite his obvious hostilities. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, “Oooh, I didn’t see any movement on this side of the garage — not even a jiggly-poo. Maybe you should give it a shot, Rachel.”
“Bastard,”Weir hissed, glaring at me, and, still bent over and still clutching, he exited stage right in a reasonable Groucho Marx imitation. For the next month, I’m sure, he ached to flip me the bird. Unfortunately, his bird lay trapped, all bundled up in a knuckles-to-elbow cast. He never asked me to sign it.
I don’t know. Maybe Weir’s a nice guy. All it takes is a bad start to make you turn a blind eye to a person’s good points. Feuds, even wars, spring from minor disagreements, burying the initial petty causes beneath a sea of hurt.
That’s what has happened with us. I’ve lost sight of any other possibilities.When I walk up the drive, peek through the front window of his Volvo station wagon, and see a copy of, say, Raymond Carver’s Cathedral or Saul Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak (always left face up, of course, on the front passenger seat), I shudder and don’t think, My, what intellect. Unfair thoughts flit past, and I can imagine Weir (not in my mind’s eye, of course), hunched over in his den, performing a one-fisted Ginger Baker drum solo on his semi-tumescent pud as he contemplates Betty Sue’s perky split infinitive (or, possibly, that strapping exchange student’s blatant dangling participle) while grading midterms.
But the bigger picture is this: what does Rachel learn, as an impressionable child, when forced to soak up interaction between the unyielding and the obstinate, the pompous and the bitter? The superficial answer would be this: learn to throw a good punch — crisp and efficient. It’s how the world works.
But that would be wrong. I’ve proven the good-punch theory to be faulty and filled with repercussions — and now I’m paying for it.
Naturally, every action, right down to the smallest, has its repercussions. Even a deed as innocent as pulling an old shoebox from a living room side table can carry more weight than you’d think.
It happened to me a few years ago. I’m not even sure what I was doing, killing time, looking for old photos, or what, but in the box I discovered a stash of dated tax returns, bills, and Visa receipts. A decade old and totally useless, they nevertheless gripped me as I thumbed through them.
They scared me for a moment, too; as I stared at a gas receipt for ten dollars (and that in itself, a ten-dollar pit stop for gas, speaks of ancient history), the only thing linking me to it was my signature — and even that had changed subtly over the years.
But beneath the gas receipt lay a sales slip from Discount Boots, 587 Queen Street West, from that same year. It was for a pair of Kodiak workboots, steel toe and shank, green patch on the ankle, $39.95. I couldn’t tell you what unfolded in the world that year, whether or not the Berlin Wall fell or if inside traders were indicted, but the receipts for those boots, physical articles that I could remember, started to suggest a real history, telling me what had unfolded in my life at that time.
That summer had been hot (and no, not redundantly so, like the night was dark), hot the way this summer is hot, the way most memorable summers seem to be hot — relentless and dry, searing the grass and sucking up the city’s water supply. In my profession you dread those times, the sheer misery, keeping up the liquids but not overdoing the salt tablets (so you don’t find yourself retching in the bushes by three o’clock in the afternoon).And to make matters worse, Defazio Bros. had landed a contract, along with four other companies, for resurfacing the walkways and common areas of all public secondary schools in the metro area with paving stones; it was a mammoth commitment, and we had to put in fifty-hour-plus weeks despite the heat.
By July we had two crews working together at Bathurst Collegiate, Constantine Sousa’s and mine. Middle-aged and balding, Constantine’s sloped shoulders and knotted arms exuded power, his biceps swelling to the size of grapefruits under a load of stone; even his belly, round and sizable, seemed rock-hard and didn’t sway or sag as he bent over in his linesman’s stance to lay brick. He had a saying as to how the pavers should go down: “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, just follow the line and break your back.”
An old-world sort of guy, Constantine looked forward to putting in five or ten more years then moving west, where the weather was more comparable with Portugal’s, and settling into a cottage-style house with his wife. But