Keeping Things Whole
[a novel]
Darryl Whetter
for A., wherever she is
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
—Mark Strand
Another image for a group of people governed by such laws is a walled city with a gate at the wall and an altar in the center. Then we may say, as the ancients did, that there is a law of the altar and a law of the gate. A person is treated differently depending on where he or she is. At the edge the law is harsher; at the altar there is more compassion.
—Lewis Hyde, The Gift
Praise for Darryl Whetter
A Sharp Tooth in the Fur
“These devious and toothsome tales are a black attack on language and lives of smartass desperation. Darryl Whetter’s debut is hallucinatory, a new brainscan, an incisor nudging our jugular.”
— Mark Anthony Jarman
“He frequently places his characters in a personal cul-de-sac, a very brave thing to do. His combination of theme and style is very admirable.”
— Alistair MacLeod
“[H]e can pin down his insights with wonderful precision [moving] from dispassionate perception to an abrupt and moving burst of emotional truth…Other tales reconfirm Whetter’s uncommon talent.”
— Globe and Mail
“Sinewy stories of disquiet and desperation…Plot, character, and dialogue zing along the taut bands of Whetter’s language…There isn’t a page in A Sharp Tooth in the Fur that doesn’t shiver with electricity fighting to be free.”
—Georgia Straight
“If David Mamet were a Canadian 20-something male, he would have put together a book of short stories that looks a lot like Darryl Whetter’s debut collection, A Sharp Tooth in the Fur.... Whetter has a mean way with a short story.
—January Magazine
“Whetter anatomizes the species in unflinching detail…All of the stories are distinguished by Whetter’s prose, which is inventive, precise, and vivid. It’s the real star of this sly, smart, and gratifyingly original collection.”
— Jack Illingworth, amazon.ca
“Whetter’s a master of one-liners, a king of openings…He has great instincts for the moment, an excellent ear for dialogue.”
—Hal Niedzviecki
“Whetter is an excellent writer, skilled at capturing minutia and investing it with meaning. He writes about arduous physical suffering and the to and fro of sexual ecstasy in an electric way.”
—Books in Canada
The Push & the Pull
“A brash, vibrant, melancholy, sexy, and finally uplifting book about a mesmerizing father, the son who can’t tear himself away, and the women who make them grow up. Whetter is intoxicated with language. He writes like a dream in a quick, urbane, and witty style. His women are gorgeous independent creatures; his men are large and infuriating; and when love happens it’s explosive, passionate, and grand. A lovely first novel.”
—Douglas Glover
“Brilliant. Darryl Whetter’s style gleams like a rare and fresh metal. Here, in a ride we haven’t seen taken, is a daunting, all-terrain, solo journey to the heart.”
—Bill Gaston
“It’s a contemporary quest narrative that never loses its focus. Sexuality, identity, and perspective fragment. But the text maintains its focus…It’s this exploration of personal freedom that really gives Whetter’s text its power. We can see the potential for tragedy. And, strangely, we hope for it.”
—David Adler, Canecdotes
“[E]xcellent writing…deeply poignant and resonating…the introspection and adventure keep you along for the read.”
—Atlantic Books Today
“Whetter weaves life’s major issues and cycling together into a journey that takes the reader through difficult but necessary places…Whetter writes like a dream and he deserves our attention.”
“Every paragraph is loaded with sharp observation and the compulsive honesty of a certain type of youth—the restless adventurer who has to learn every lesson for himself.”
—OptiMYz Magazine
Origins: Poems
“If I may coin a new word, it is ethnoecogeo-science poetry of the highest calibre and may be, like the fossils described, the first of its kind to drag itself out of the tidal water and waddle on this new poetic beach.”
—Halifax Chronicle Herald
“The scathing ‘Privileged Young Men Who Hate Creativity’ is a standout. Whetter’s critical eye is felt throughout, but no other poem hits this hard…Such unabashed aggression is so refreshing that a reader can’t help but hope Whetter stays on this poetic detour.”
—Quill & Quire
“Whetter’s poems are arresting, genuine, full of science and wonder, and reflect the author’s tough love for Maritime life.”
—Donna Morrissey
Copyright © 2013, Darryl Whetter
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.
Vagrant Press is an imprint of
Nimbus Publishing Limited
3731 Mackintosh St, Halifax,
NS B3K 5A5
(902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca
Printed and bound in Canada
NB1096
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Heather Bryan
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Whetter, Darryl, 1971-, author
Keeping things whole / Darryl Whetter.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77108-030-9 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77108-031-6 (pdf).
ISBN 978-1-77108-033-0 (mobi).—ISBN 978-1-77108-032-3 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8595.H387K43 2013 C813’.6 C2013-903430-7
C2013-903431-5
Vagrant Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.
Table of Contents
Praise for Darryl Whetter
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
I. Down
1. Send
2. Windsor Rain
3. Das Boot
4. Safe Sisters
5. Sin City
6. Voodoo Unchained
7. (This) Ant Farm
8. Detroit Industry
9. Trevor Appleseed
10. Rolled & Ready
11. (M)otherwise
12. We Safe Here?
13. McTreb
14. Family Pride
15. Who Knows the Guy
16. Draft Age
17. Courage Atlas
18. The Foundry
19. Listening Posts
20. Me Too
21. The (R)evolution Will Not Be Televised
22. Take It
23. Paper Clips
24. (Beneath) the Belly of the Beast
25. Getting Her Spine
II. Across
26. Three Short Days
27. Initial Solutions
28. Medea, Medea
29. This Bird Has Flown
30. The Sugar Deal
31. Homeschooling
32. The Uns
33. A French Inhale
34. Speered
35. Mombeth
36. Mombeth II
37. The Zug Exhale
38. Cronus Productions Ltd.
39. Ambassador
III. Up
40. Width, Height
41. Or Another
42. Blow Your Mine
43. The Land of Surprises
44. Theseus of Canadian Tire
45. Pain Is an Expanding Gas
46. This One
47. The Necessary
48. The Earthly Paradise
49. Send
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I. Down
1. Send
I’m so glad you’re here. The ball’s been in your court since you were about seven. Early forties, not a dad, I couldn’t tell you how old a kid needs to be to Google Antony Williams. I assume seven or eight, though obviously you needed much longer before you typed “Antony Williams” “Keeping Things Whole” and spun the wheel. Much longer and stories from someone else. Apparently loose lips can raise a ship too.
I bought the domain www.keepingthingswhole.ca on your second birthday. Fifteen years has been worth the wait. Other passwords would have worked—Ambassador, Rowing to Cuba, Peg, William Williams, Cronus, Victor-Conrad, Ontario Farm—though I’m glad you chose the most obvious: Medea. You keep reading, I’ll keep waiting and making us money. It’s all legit now, I swear. (Okay, no Cuban: I’m sure even your parents dip their oars a little come tax time).
Every story is a staircase. Let me know if ours can only go down. Is there a statute of limitations on gifts from the heart? To the heart?
Anything’s possible if you just reach over and click Send.
2. Windsor Rain
The first time I saw her, she was down by the river, running in the rain. Filly legs. Little show-jumper’s ass. The sweetest moment of my 1998 (and, pre-you, probably my life). Katherine Chan, Scottish-Chinese-Canadian. She had this long Iroquois hair swishing across her back as she ran, the tail of a horse that looked about ready to leap the Detroit River and keep going on the other side. All this in a woman willing to pay for what she wanted, not taking rain for an answer. I was driving home after an honest day’s house painting. Riverside Drive was thick with traffic and there went determination on two trim legs. She wasn’t running in drizzle or a sun shower, but steady rain. Windsor under her feet and ghost-town Detroit hanging alongside her.
The first glimpse I had of her was dedication, self-sculpted legs scissoring through a syrupy September rain. When I drove up onto the sidewalk of Riverside Park, flung open the door of my painter’s truck and began running after her—attracting up to two coast guards or police forces—the first thing she knew about me was risk. Or stupidity. Or brashness. But it was that or nothing, probably never see her again. For more than two decades I worked constantly to avoid police attention. At least three generations (the close, the distant, and the unknown) would have rolled in their smugglers’ graves to see me hopping up onto the sidewalk like that. Then again, half those groaning ancestors might not be mine.
Fortunately the world has no better shoe for house painting than a running shoe, and I was raised by a yoga-crazy drama teacher who taught me to stand tall and stand on something supportive. I left the truck door hanging open and ran after her in the pelting rain. I kept a wide buffer between us, but saw her head tilt and dart a little as she heard me approach. In went her elbows. I ran abreast, then a bit ahead so she could see me without feeling stared at. “Excuse me, I’m hoping to say hello before I get towed away.” I pointed back at my truck parked on the sidewalk with its ads for foolishness and Victor-Conrad, Windsor’s Painter hanging on the open door. “A self-employed voracious reader who cooks a mean basil peanut chicken. I was an engineering student but didn’t want to become a drone.”
Not a word from her, just the legs and the nostrils pumping their bit. Drapes of cold rain all around us. A flash of her brown eyes meeting mine.
“I’m trying to be honest here. My name’s Antony Williams. Running in the rain like this, you’re obviously not waiting for someone to hand you the world. May I get your name?”
Voodoo-the-dog and I had been jogging together for years. Eventually you grow to see running not as a spring from the calves or a reach from the quads, but as music on air. The bottom of your spine and the tray of your hips learn to fly in the airborne seconds between one leg and the next. When two runners pass each other they’re weavers unfurling bolts of soul cloth. Tolerance for pain visible in a second. The balance of risk and reward. But she wasn’t sharing.
“Okay, sorry. Back to your run.”
Only after I’d cut my politely wide J-hook away from her and doubled back did I hear her half-yell, “Kate.” She was deep into her run, all oiled lung machine, so she knocked the word out with belly and breath. Kate hung in that international air, a slow, aural flare illuminating the river and the growing distance between our backs. I didn’t turn around to better savour the fading sound. Kate. Kate. Kate. A warm cloth down my damp back.
Of course I couldn’t clutch at the stitch in my side, and was prepared, for once, to tell the cops the truth. “Had to do it, Officer. I think I’m in love. Thunderbolt.” In my line, you always have to be ready to meet a cop.
3. Das Boot
Mom might also have been a rain runner if she wasn’t always at rehearsal, school, or yoga. I grew up on the 4-M plan: mother’s milk, music, and martial arts. At five I was enrolled in piano and tae kwon do. Guess which one I stuck with.
A few years before I saw Kate out in the rain, Gloria thought she was hitting me where it hurts when she threw me out. No bigs. My wallet was fine, and moving out improved both my slinging and my dating. I was still a little young when I got the boot, nineteen, though you don’t grow up by numbers. You grow up by getting things done and by having the minimum amount of shit done to you. Another hard lesson from Glore. Getting kicked out was the last young thing I did. So I say.
Ultimately, her throwing me out was just more theatre, one of the three Williams family trades—tunneller, smuggler, liar. At university, I’d already propped Gloria’s door open by enrolling in engineering, not something respectably useless like philosophy or English. When I quit without a degree, I was practically moving out the first box. As for my truck and ladder work as a painter, well, Mom was right to think that where there was smoke, there was smoke.
She threw me out during a bullfight. Sunday night. We’d been watching 60 Minutes, and there was a segment coming up on Spain’s latest bullfighting phenom. Anyone wants to fight a tonne of horned muscle, that’ll keep me awake. This Spanish guy, somewhere in that glorious age between twenty-five and thirty, promise and accomplishment both. And inhumanly gorgeous. Slow-roast a taller Tom Cruise over mesquite coals, give him an accent that strokes you from throat to knee, and you’d have a fraction of this guy’s power. Mom let out a little “Hubba-hubba.” The brown eyes, the tan, the dark stubble—Mr. Olive Cruise dissolved wedding rings with a glance. And he was the shit, the reigning Spanish bull tha-hing. Mr. Contemporary doing the traditional glam. His grandfather had been the bull king in his day, same again for his father. But apparently bulls, not matadors, decide when a matador’s career is over. Gramps was killed in the ring. Papa got gored on live TV. So his mom dug in, decided to save the son no matter what. Took the boy out of Spain, educated him in America, all the private schools and blonde muff he could hope fo
r. Thrill juice in the blood? Mom encouraged him to ski, got him sailing. Adrenaline management, not prohibition. Had him flying down mountains on bikes and climbing them with thin rope. Anything but bulls. The whole nation had watched his father die. Generation after generation, the only adults in the family that lasted were the women. Bit of a pattern, that. Mom and I didn’t share a word after the first ten seconds.
But the Spaniard came home a man, and home meant bulls. Dad and Grandpa gone, how’d he even learn the dance? Who knew, but Don Cojones had the touch. The old leathery men they interviewed, ring rats their whole lives, they all agreed that the kid was even better than his father, closer to the grace of his grandfather. Mitad toro, one of them said, part bull, a minotaur with a convertible and dozens of marriage prospects. The kid couldn’t stop. To his mom, that was wouldn’t stop. So she threw him out.
Still he won and won. A villa, a ranch, all from a wave of the cape. He piled everything into the ring. Bought land to raise bulls, personally mated them. Stick around with the smell of spunk up your nose, you know you’re in for the long haul. “This is who I am,” he told the show’s only female interviewer. Everyone—the interviewer, his mom, mine, me—we all knew he was saying a version of that old line: a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Crime. Bullfighting. Enlisting in the army. All these rituals sons invoke to divorce their mothers. I figured this was definitely going to earn me one of Gloria’s kitchen-counter notes the next morning. Antony, you have always been…. X is good about you, so is Y, but stop being someone I don’t want you to be.
Apparently she was done with half measures. She hadn’t forgotten about the trebuchets I’d been building for half my life and knew better than I did that much of the Windsor shoreline is just six hundred metres from the Detroit border. She, not I, had met a Trevor Reynolds who drove over the Ambassador Bridge into exile, the Stars and Stripes fading in his rear-view.
Two years before the goodbye bullfight, I’d essentially stopped asking her for money. She came back from an MFA year in Chicago to a teenaged son suddenly keen to pay his own way. She heard me take a lot of brief cellphone calls, and I paid cash for everything, my token rent included. The next time the camera went in close on Don Handsome’s face, him again with the I must, I must, Gloria turned to me long enough to say, “Get out,” then left the room.