Who Is Good to Me, Whom I Revile — Rod Moody-Corbett                             

I didn’t much care for my daughter’s husband, but I abhorred his moustache. Short and wan and incipiently puerile, he kept the thing neurotically well-lubricated, affecting a sharp, discontented part down his philtrum. The wax he favoured came in a small oval tin, smelled faintly of vanilla and the candles people bring camping to kill mosquitos. Whatever its constituents, I was plainly allergic.  Rivulets of snot beaded on sight. 

“Can’t you just tell him to get rid of it?”    

“He’s doing it for the cancer, Dad. Go easy on him. Wayne’s been through a lot.”

Back in October Wayne had discovered a cluster of leaky red freckles like a smearing of crushed raspberries (by my daughter’s musing) on the braille of his nuts, but here was the real hurt: I’d paid $55 for that moustache. Throughout the entirety of Wayne’s Movember campaign, I remained the lone donor; no one, not Janie, nor either of Wayne’s parents, had bothered a dole. 

By way of reparation for this charity I soon found myself the luckless recipient of weekly moustache updates. These were stark, sepia-tinted images, mainly, Wayne in some hallway, unsmiling and gaunt. “Looking good,” I wrote back; or, once, “What’s with the sweater?”

On Boxing Day, while Wayne was out clearing the walk (that moustache nowhere near gone), I lowered a strand of phlegm into his Baileys. This little flash of vandalism passed over me with such urgency and exhilaration that, observing his progress through the kitchen window, I felt overcome by a sudden vengeful stirring. I let down a second jot of spittle, still drearier than the first, and gave this a wiggle with my thumb. I exercised, as I saw it, a proprietary handle over Wayne’s moustache. I had every right to deplore it.    

***

These days Wayne works for me. 

I own and operate an independent outfitting shop in the northernmost haunches of the city—up Centre, east off Beddington Trail. We are primarily a ski shop; hence the name, Herringbone’s. We service backcountry and cross but no downhill. Come spring we’re camping and climbing, bikes, paddleboards, some kayaks. We don’t sell many kayaks, but I like keeping them in stock.

Taken from without, our store is not much to look at. Peeling white clapboard over warped cedar shakes. Magpies roost in our awning’s stricken beams. The steps leading up from the curb are crumbly and sloped; our ramp wobbles. I’ve been meaning to fix all of this since forever ago, but I keep putting it off. Our lot abuts a line of newish condos done up in gaudy oxblood brick and high wide windows I wouldn’t want to live behind. Our own windows feature a pair of mannequin alpinists assenting a wintery diorama of borax and foam. Every couple of weeks we get realtors twigging offers to our door, but I’ll never sell.  

Not surprisingly, we do our best business in the winter months with our starter packages (skis, poles, boots, bindings); we mount bindings free of charge, and throw in a coat of wax. Dusty Juric, a taut, muttering old slab of Croatian extraction, runs waxing clinics the second Thursday of every month. Dusty’s been with me for over a decade, and though well into his sixties, still competes in all the provincial loppets. Come race day, he is regarded by many as something of a Tiresias in the waxing huts, a real prophet in matters of grip and glide. Also, the man is ripped. Bic-bald and hale, relaxing his bulk on the sturdier of our two display cases—where we keep all of our scrapers and corks and bright Velcro clasps and fasteners—you can see, through the arms of the sheer, moisture-wicking thermals he wears under flannels year-round, tendons, thick as rhubarb stalks.     

Yet, for all his sinew, Dusty is a sufferer, just like the rest of us. A scrupulous student of locks and knobs, of shutters, sashes, stoves and plugs, it takes the man hours to close shop. “Christ,” he’s said to me on more than one occasion, as we two were quitting for the day, “I left my wallet inside.” Wallet, sunglasses, phone, watch. I’ve seen Dusty—Dusty, who beat cancer, a no-joke stage-three colorectal—reeling through a finish line at the end of a 50km trek, florid and heaving, his broad, fleshy nostrils massing stalactites of sweat, looking altogether less vanquished than at the prospect of needing to perform yet another round of his checks, as he calls them. I offer to lock up in his stead but it hurts his pride to have me around witnessing. And that’s fine. Better (from what reading I’ve done on the subject) to let these compulsions play out their own interminable wickedness. Minus my interfering, I mean. Which is no easy feat, let me tell you, backing out of our break room, where I’ll find him, hunched over the sink, suds foaming, knuckles and palms badged with callouses and cuts. Worse than Lady Macbeth, I say. My poor Dusty. 

As for Wayne, well, Wayne, I hired out of deference to my daughter. Because the truth is, I’d do anything for Janie. Really, I would. 

When she was just a clumsy little tyke, we used to stop by Eau Claire and feed the ducks. I’d let her toddle on down to the river’s edge with her bag of bagel chunks, a trail of bread sliding from her fingers, as the ducks, twisting in the turbid current, sifted and plumbed. But this one afternoon—early spring: the ground slick and smudgy with thaw—I guess I must’ve drifted off, gone listless, because one minute she’s bumbling along the path dispensing her crumbs like a drunken tree planter, chortling to herself (“Fuck, fuck,” which was what she called ducks), and the next thing I know she’s shrieking. I snap to, a scorch of adrenaline coursing up my throat; and as I’m turning around, I see there’s this great heinous goose rearing up its foliage and storming right at her. Now you read online all about these birds attacking people; and you know what, honestly, I really think something ought to be done to stop them. I remember skimming some clips last summer of a woman in Ottawa who got knocked clean off her bike. Bruises and cuts searing all down one cheek, both eyes saucy and blackened. They’d make short work of a child, no question. So, yes. All this to say, I attacked a goose. I charged the one gobbling at Janie, grabbed it up by its tough black bendy throat and hurled it into the water, just as another—the mother, I later learned—set upon me from behind. I teetered into the shallows with the wings of this matriarch battling down on me. I obtained a deep gash on my forehead but—lo and behold—made the front page of The Calgary Sun. Anyway, the point I’m attempting to make here is this: I protected her. I did. The analogy isn’t one-to-one—I get that—but keeping Wayne around the shop demands a certain kind of resignation, I think; yes, a certain kind of love.   

***

My daughter and Wayne have been married what? Six years now? Seven? They met at Mount Royal University, where Janie, who now teaches early French immersion at Bishop Pinkham, completed her B.Ed., and where Wayne was either majoring or minoring his way through a degree or certificate (I understand there are differences) in Film Studies or Script Writing or something equally fiscally suicidal like that.  

“So you like movies,” I remember asking him the first time Janie brought Wayne round the house. “See anything good lately?”

“I admire Tarkovsky,” he said, tweezing a scab of unmelted cheese off his garlic toast, and setting this shiny, gloomy sum to the edge of his plate. “I think I’m probably one of the only people in the entire world who prefers Solaris to Stalker.” 

“Is that with the one with Matt Damon?” 

“You’re thinking of Clooney, Dad.”

“I thought the Clooney was the one where Sandra Bullock gets lost in space.”

“That’s Gravity,” my daughter explained. “Wayne’s talking about the Russians.”

“The Russians?”

“Actually, they shot quite a few of the exteriors in Akasaka,” said Wayne. “Which people tend to forget.”

I didn’t have much to say to this. “Have you seen The King’s Speech?”

Wayne and Janie got together through a mutual friend, Dana—a mutual friend, I might add, with whom Janie is no longer on speaking terms. Dana remains one of MRU’s more distinguished alumna. Last I heard she’d landed a directing gig on a miniseries set to air this time next year on Apple TV, a three-part adaptation of Catherine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada—and maybe there’s some resentment in there, I don’t know. It’s not my place to speculate. 

Me, I always liked Dana. I felt less the dad in her company than some kind of corruptible uncle, blundering but sweet. We split a joint at the wedding, after the speeches. 

“You sounded pretty emotional up there,” she said. “I thought for sure you were going to cry.”

“I was crying,” I told her.   

We stood in a damp, gravely lot off the kitchen. The evening had turned over to drizzle, and coins of cold orange light glinted through the mist. Dana took her time readying the joint, busting up the meatier buds and spacing out their hairs at an even squiggle. I undid the top button of my shirt and loosened my tie. The scotch I sipped had an unwelcome finish, almost honeyed, but the air felt good on my throat.

Dana cupped a match to her face and lit up. “You really don’t like him, do you?” she said, offering me the joint.

An old paint can lay between us; suffused in rainwater, cigarettes crowded its brim like nuggets of risen gnocchi. 

I said, “I think he’s very talented,” coughed, and handed the joint back to Dana.

“Name me two talents,” she said.

“Just two?” I asked, as the door to the kitchen swung open, and out poked the head of one of the groomsmen, a younger kid, Michael or Jeffrey, one of the cousins. 

“They’re looking for you,” said the head, hollow-cheeked and sullen, a sorry scrobbing of zits ripening on the lately razored jaws. “I guess everyone’s about set to cut the cake.” 

***

Wayne, for his part, had done some acting but his talents, his impulses, as he called them, dormed elsewhere. This preference, if preference it was, came down to his face, which, by his own admission, was too grim for TV, too sallow for celluloid, though he could play sleazy bit grifters along the Buscemi mold. He’d materialized for about fifteen seconds one or two Fargos ago, catching a wad of errant buckshot under his chin. For this role costuming had him parading a feathery grey mullet and neon ski coat. The coat had a wide floppy collar with pink inlay. If you YouTube “fargo ice cream shootout,” you’ll catch a quick glimpse of Wayne’s face (pre-moustache) before a shotgun brisks away with his skull.  

As to movies, he’d written and directed a few shorts himself. They featured an inordinate number of mammalian fatalities and pensive closeups of mastication, predominantly among the elderly in their orientation. The soundtracks, which he scored with a friend, were bleak, atonal and synthy. I didn’t love them. 

Recently, he’d been talking nonstop about an idea he had for a TV show. It concerned a  homeless man, or a man experiencing homelessness, a veteran, Wayne told me, “from either Afghanistan or Iraq somewhere,” who one fall morning detonates an IED outside the Harry Hays Building on Fourth. 

“I want to break it up over a bunch of episodes, with each episode following a new character, but then have it be like so the whole story takes place over the span of one day. No flashbacks, no backstory, nothing. My feeling is that it’ll sort of be like The Wire meets 21 Grams. Or like Sense8 but only like way less Matrixy and things like that.”   

The candidness with which such pronouncements came freighted was wearying. Wayne brooded for his art. And one was meant to appreciate the brooding.   

Of course, he could be absolute hell watching movies with; really, the worst. He inaugurated the Sunday ritual of Family Movie Night; and so, as a family, then, I suffered. Since its inception, we’ve managed a veritable purgatory of shorter stuff: that French one the Bruce Willis one with the monkeys is based on; the one of Dali’s where the woman’s eye gets slit open with a straight razor—“Did you know they actually used a calf’s eye? For a while people thought it was maybe a pig’s or a sheep’s. But it wasn’t.”—Janie usually dozing with the cat on her half of the couch, me, on my plum rocker, mulling over Wayne’s refried audio commentary, Wayne who sat (quite literally on the edge of his seat) palming chin, clapping, shooting me these stiff baleful winces if I so much as deliberated licking the salt off a chip, and all of this (needless to say) on my TV, in my house—my chips, my chairs, my cat.   

He was big on the awards shows—in fairness, I guess they both were—insisting we watch all of these together, the Globes, Oscars, even the Emmys. They made a big production of the popcorn and dips, their laptops and phones at the ready. I can’t say I derived any pleasure from this, but Janie appeared to enjoy herself. When Oprah delivered her acceptance of the Cecille B. DeMille at the Globes, Janie cried; and well, I got pretty teary, too.  

“Seriously?” Wayne said. He was already on his phone. “I mean I get where she’s coming from, right, but this is like the last thing anyone needs right now. Chaos—the unknown. I mean, this woman,” he said. 

Janie got up and left the room. 

I didn’t say anything. I studied his moustache, its central divot, which seemed to me the source of some demonic, indefatigable evil. 

“She’s just an ISA. Anyone can see that,” Wayne continued. 

“Nobody knows what that means,” I said. 

“Ideological. State. Apparatus. All these social justice warriors, these altruists, she’s part of the problem,” he said, facing me. “We all are.”

Yes, he was big on his theory or theories, his spectres of late Zuckerberg. For my sixty-first birthday, he presented me with a copy of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. The accompanying card was a Gary Larson I didn’t get and took place in hell. The Peterson I am still using to sheet the bottom of my compost bin.  

***

Now the boils on Wayne’s nuts were not tumorous, of course, and their removal—a dermatologist had simply scalded them off with a sort of laser-guided dental curette—had not required his staying at the clinic much longer than an hour.  

“How’re they doing?” I asked.   

“Worse,” said Wayne.  

This would’ve been the last Tuesday in January, and with Janie away in Edmonton for the week prepping the provincial curriculum, I’d offered to chauffeur and chaperone, as the local they’d administered might make him a little loopy. 

“Your testes are definitely going to feel tender for the next few days, but the purple should start to subside in a week or two,” the clinician said. “In the meantime, Dr. Foster’s prescribed some hydrocortisone, which should help bring down the swelling.”

That afternoon, as I drove Wayne back to their apartment, I like to think that there passed between us a moment of calm, unobstructed comradery. It was nearing rush hour and we were stopped behind a line of trucks coming back over Crowchild. The sky’s blue had faded to gun smoke under a matting of fat, taupe-bellied clouds. I drummed my fingers against the wheel and watched what looked like a youngish bald eagle, perched on a traffic pole, shift its wings and rifle around in its dark dingy plumage, as if hunting for a set of keys it’d lost in there.

“Is that an osprey?” Wayne asked. 

“Eagle,” I said. “Notice the whitening around the eyes? The paling beak?” 

“Not really,” Wayne said. 

“Well, an osprey’s eyes are banded,” I said, though I had no idea if this were true. 

Wayne shrugged. “Look, thanks again for getting me.” 

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s my pleasure.” 

“It’s just things have been like difficult for us lately. Money-wise.”

The eagle straightened and flitted its wings, narrowing its wide yellow eyes. 

“I guess the thing is,” Wayne said, “is I need money.”

“Okay,” I said.   

“I don’t mean a loan. I mean if I really needed money, I mean like really needed it, I could always ask my parents. I wouldn’t. But, if I needed to, I could. No, what I’m saying is—I mean, I guess what I’m looking at here is a sense of stability, of things being—”

“Stable.”

“Yeah. Like a sense of grounding.” 

“You’re asking for a job,” I said. 

“A job, yes, but so here’s what I’m saying, here’s what I’m willing to bring to the table.” 

***

I started Wayne in receiving, away from customers, and away from Dusty, whose countenance underwent contortions of pained boredom whenever Wayne entered his orbit. “There’s something wrong with this kid. In his mind. I look at him, and I think, I don’t know, unhappy things.”  

In the relatively low-stakes hinterland of our basement storehouse, where the worst one might do would be to drop a crampon or misprice a tent, Wayne agitated more fuckups than he soothed. I’d made the mistake of asking him to review the structural integrity of our wares as he was unpacking boxes, to keep an eye out for scratches and tears before registering a packable field shovel with a grisly white dent flaming up off the collar (for example) into our system. This seemed like a simple enough brief, to my mind, but within a week, Wayne had ennobled himself from stock boy to product tester. He stubbed poles on our concrete flooring, dulling tips, blotting ferrules; he tinkered with hatchets, knives, rubberized handsaws; and dabbled in all manner of apparel: harnesses, hut boots, neoprene gaiters, and toques.   

A pervasive laziness accompanied these amusements, and when Wayne wasn’t visiting some new abuse on our merchandise, I’d find him lounging in tents, hammocks, or—once—bundled away in a pricy hydrophobic down mummy bag, suckling on an organic energy gel, and streaming reviews of retro first-person shooters on his phone. “GmanLives,” Wayne said, a dun gob of gel pearling off his stache. “He’s an Australian YouTuber. I don’t often agree with his assessments, but I find the range of his antipathy quite fascinating.”  

What could I do? Fire him? Dock his pay? Go running to Janie? In my defence, I orchestrated my share of interventions. I chastised and harangued; I entertained ultimatums. “Your husband,” I said, practicing in the mirror, “I know he’s family, and you know I’m here for you, that you can always count on me for anything, but this is insane, this is my limit. Wayne’s not working out.”    

Because look. I’m not evil guy. Not one of those sitcom pops, a tyrannical killjoy hall-monitoring bedrooms, basement ambience, a fuming ruler tumid with curfews, no. I’ve got better things to do with my time. Added to which I’ve withstood my share of boyfriends. Cory, Matthew, Michael, Lance—Lance, the penultimate suitor, who rode dirt bikes, who called me hoss (as in “Get after that turkey leg, hoss.”), who fist-bumped and hugged too much, burrowing his chin in the crook of my shoulder with reckless sincerity; Lance, who couldn’t remember which Korea was “the bad one” (“Don’t know, don’t care.”); Lance, who’d once called me at work, voice winded with fright, because he’d accidentally set a tinfoil-sheathed thing of chickpeas afire in the microwave. “I think I might’ve just burned down our entire apartment complex,” he said. “I didn’t know who to call.” “Wait,” I said, listening, divining a yawning drone. “Is the microwave still on?” 

But Wayne? Wayne? 

One Friday afternoon near the end February, a concerned Dusty alerted me to Wayne’s presence upstairs. “He’s over by the backpacks. The carriers. He’s got some sort of toy baby with him. You need to go deal with this.” 

The child was soft-bodied and perturbingly lifelike, with blonde, hand-rooted hair, puffy cheeks, a cheerless red mouth. Wayne had draped a teal raincoat over this creature’s torso and was in the process of coaxing its limbs inside one of our carriers’ padded cockpits. 

“What’s all this?” 

“I’m taking pictures,” Wayne said, stepping back, squinting, finger-framing his shot.

“I can see that,” I said. “Why?”   

“For our Instagram.” 

“What’s wrong with my website?”  

“There’s a website?”

“Excuse me,” a man’s voice said. “I’m sorry to interrupt. But could I get one of you guys to give us a hand over here with some sizing?”

A family of four had gathered in the aisle behind us. The man who’d spoken—thickset, bearish, a chummy crinkling of dimples creasing his cheeks—wore a black Canada Goose jacket (last season’s Expedition Parka, retailing $1,500 per), ripstop joggers, a pair of spotless Arc’teryx. I smiled. 

“Certainly,” I said. “What can we do for you?”

The Marshalls, Cora and Dave and their daughters, were in from Tacoma. They’d followed the I-90 east over Ellensburg and Moses Lake as far as Missoula, crossing into Alberta at the Chief Mountain border. “Spent a night in Waterton wandering around where they had that fire. 35,000 hectares,” said Dave, suppressing the h for a French affect that made his wife wince. “Can’t imagine how those flames never swallowed the entire town up whole. Saw a couple bighorn sheep, elk.” 

“Those weren’t elk,” Cora said. “The antlers came out more like this.” She demonstrated. “Like spikes.”

“It’s true,” the smaller of the two girls added. She was staring at our floor, and I wished she wouldn’t, drifting a boot over a cracked, water-marred tile. 

“Well, whatever,” Dave said. “Goat, sheep, elk. What do I know? We came into Calgary from Lethbridge yesterday, up through the coulees and all that. My sister, she’s a civil engineer, right, so she tells me, says, ‘Dave, you make sure you stop in Lethbridge and see the viaduct.’ So okay fine, now I can tell everyone back home we’ve seen a bridge and—”

“And now we’re looking for skis,” said Cora. 

It took us an hour, but Dusty and I kitted out the entire clan. Wayne managed the register and even helped the kids suss out sturdy touring gloves with the touchscreen functionality on the index finger and thumb.  

“One more thing,” said Dave, tapping his card on our debit terminal, “I don’t know if this is something you guys can help us out with or not, but we’re hoping to score some recommendations on backcountry tours. Not looking to hop into anything too intense, but it’d be great to get someone who knows the mountains to show us the lay of the land, steer us away from the touristy hotspots. There’d be just the four of us and—”

“Receipt?” Wayne asked. 

Dave shook his head.

“When were you thinking?” I asked. 

“When works for you?”  

***

The next morning, pulling up to Janie and Wayne’s apartment—I’d enlisted Wayne in the hopes of inculcating some real-world experience and left Dusty in charge of the shop—I spotted my daughter at the kitchen window, negotiating a swoop of drooping vinyl blinds. The robe she wore had belonged to her mother, a powder blue garment, with an excess of fleece rolling over the collar. Seeing me, she abandoned the blinds and, inclining her coffee, bid me a groggy hello. Fresh snow billowed the hedges from which chickadees clicked and swung. Fixed to the patio was a slant iron trellis with two lantern feeders sprigged to its rails. One of the feeders had tipped, and a few of the birds were snatching at the dashes of sunflower seed and scattered millet.  

Wayne emerged in a fog of condensation from the side door in a tight navy duffle with tan yokes. An empty travel mug dangled from the ring of his right pinky finger, his large laceless red keds flopping in the snow. He was only wearing jeans. 

“You going to be warm enough?” 

“I’ve got pants in my bag.”

“You brought gloves?”

He searched inside his coat and produced a pair of woolly smoker’s mitts.

“Suit yourself,” I said.  

Normally I’m not one for guided tours. You factor gas, time away from shop, provisions, and these sojourns rarely warrant the hassle. But the Marshalls had spent money. I’d arranged to link up with Dave at the Hyrdoline Lookout off Boulton Creek, which makes a two hour drive through Kananaskis, south of Peter Lougheed, past Fisher Peak, and on over the old Sheep River trailer park.   

I live for the mountains but I love best those moments before you crest them, the undulant shrubland lurching up rises muraled in firs. I gaze up at the summits, the juts, the precipitous scree slabs aproned in ice, and think: I could climb that; I couldn’t climb that; nobody could climb that. Riding with Wayne put me in a different mood entirely. We listened to a podcast, something about a pox of feral hogs; and rode in silence, a harrowing calm, strafing windrowed fields dotted in haybales and silage. Capped in white canvas, I thought they resembled sushi rolls, stacked and neatened, but Wayne didn’t think so. “You mean like maki?” he asked. Cattle trailed along the poky box wire fences. I figured these for Herefords. Slow-moving, ruddy, their large solemn heads shabby with frost. As we came through Ozada—its forsaken coal mine and PoW camp (Nazis, I said to Wayne, captured during the North Africa campaign, billeted here)—the mountains’ hoary cornices loomed into view. To the right of us, shooting up through a stitch of pollarded windbreak, I glimpsed the rump of a bolted deer. I pointed across the dash and Wayne tried to take a picture with his phone but missed. 

Wayne’s moustache hazed in the light, like a filament of lucent gauze. In such moments, I wondered at its utility, which seemed almost vestigial, like wisdom teeth or man’s nipples. In what kind of world, and to the deferment of what evolutionary threat, had Wayne’s moustache once served a purpose? I allowed that it looked better in the shade, with the streaks of copper stubble thickening on his cheeks, but not much better. 

***

The Marshalls had already unloaded their skis by the time we trundled into Boulton. I left Wayne to his wind pants and moseyed down the lot to greet them.  

“Great day,” I said.  

Cora and the girls had their skis propped up against the picketed map placard. An embarrassed Dave squatted at the mouth of the trail in a sweep of bumpy snowmobile tracks fretting at the back of his binding with a pole.  

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” he said. “I think maybe I’ve got mine on the wrong foot.”   

“No such thing.” I offered him my shoulder and told him to step down deep with his toes. 

I hauled our gear out of the trunk and set our skis down near the trailhead. The snow was new and cold, but with the midmorning sun flowing through the trees, I opted for a softer wax. 

“I still can’t understand why you’ve got to go and brush it all off,” Wayne said, watching me. “Like, if you’re just looking to get a good grip, what’s the point?”  

We were the first ones on the trail. I’d expected a dull plod, but the Marshalls, kids included, were no hayseeds. (“There was a place over by Hurricane Ridge, not far from Port Angeles, you remember that, girls? Nice wide groomed track. We used to go down there a couple times a year. Remember?”) Still, I thought it best not to take us out too fast. I led at an easy, chatty pace, pointing out ranges, peaks, slickrock fissures, and cliffs. 

“Keep an eye out for dippers,” I said, as we shushed past a partly frozen stream. 

“What’s a dippers?” Wayne asked.  

“A kind of bird,” I said. “They’re like robins, only greyer, with these long clawed feet—”

“It’s so they can walk underwater,” said the older of the two girls, Rebecca. “That’s where they pull up most of their food, even in winter. They’ve got what’s called a nictitating membrane, basically a third eyelid, like a cat, which lets them see when they’re fully submerged.”

“So, what, they can swim?” Wayne asked. 

“Yes,” the girl said, “they can swim. But that’s not the distinguishing thing. Loons swim. Petrels, grebes. Dippers can actually walk underwater.”  

Rebecca rode fast on my heels. She was a touch clumsier navigating the uphills, sinking herself forward, knees knocked, her ski tails crossing. “Stand up tall. Lean into the hill with your top,” I told her. “That’s it. Don’t plant so wide with your poles. There you go. See. No need to jump out of the tracks.”  

We descended a slender chute, the smooth uncurving track vaulted in Jack pine and spruce. I relaxed my poles on my hips and coasted. The bottom of the next hill leveled out on an open valley flat, and we stopped and waited for the others. The sun was pouring in from the east. Steam lifted off the frosted tamaracks, encasing their pinkish-grey bark in a golden cast. Rebecca peeled off a glove and scratched under her hat. 

“Warm enough?” I asked.

“Too warm,” she said.   

Cora and the youngest came down next, with Dave trailing an unsteady Wayne. I’d told him to keep his arms out level on the descents, that, to fortify balance and stability as you picked up speed, it sometimes helped to imagine yourself a waiter bussing a tray of wobbly drinks. Watching Wayne come down the hill, edging out his right ski like a protractor compass, I could tell this was all he was thinking about. 

“How’s it coming, Wayne?”

He unzipped his jacket and stared hatefully at his boots. “I think you gave me the wrong size,” he said.  

Skiing ahead with the Marshall girl, I couldn’t help but think about Janie. She didn’t ski anymore, and I suppose this was my fault. Her love of the sport had fallen away for my zealotry. I pushed her hard and I pushed her early. But god could she ski. She was technically brilliant—her 2-skate second to none—superior and more efficient, even, than Dusty. I used to love watching her practice, darting around the stadium loop at the Canmore Nordic Centre. Best were those weeknights when the two of us would drive over to Confederation Park after dinner to clock a few extra miles. The city maintained a groomed track through the winter, and some nights we’d stop for cocoa and donuts on the way home. 

Up ahead was the Kananaskis Fire Lookout. On a clear day you can see down into Elk Pass and along the scree bands and gorges lining the north Opal Ridge. They keep the tower vacant through the winter, and I was excited to take off my skis, scurry up to the observatory and have a gander. But Rebecca and I had pulled away from the others, and I could tell she was feeling antsy. 

I thought I could hear a set of poles picking through the woods but the sound drew off. Rebecca swished her skis, sniffled. 

“Why don’t we double back?” I said. “See what happened to those slowpokes.” 

We spun around in our tracks and clambered up one hill and down most of another and into a sudden narrow lip of flatness before we saw them, Dave, Cora, Hunter—that was the youngest one—assembled around Wayne, who stood rooted upright next to a sharp naked tree, twitching, a sprinkling of what looked like muddy urine or blood pooling in the snow. 

“We tried calling you,” Dave said.  

“Wayne,” I said. He opened his mouth but didn’t make a sound. A length of branch, not much broader than a dowel rod, basically, was pronged in his right eye. “Jesus,” I said, slipping and steadying myself with a pole. “Jesus Christ.”

“Dad,” he said.

“Don’t call me that.”   

“Dad.”  

“Don’t move,” I said. “Does it hurt?”

The branch didn’t appear to be bedded in too deep, but then what, when it comes to eyes, constitutes too deep? The skewered eye had the consistency of orange marmalade with pieces of rind in it. There was less blood than you’d think but then I couldn’t really bring myself to look at him for long.  

“We were coming down fast, and I think the tip of his ski must’ve caught,” Dave said.  

“Am I still dying?” Wayne wondered philosophically. And then, “Can someone pass me my phone?” 

“Girls, come on.” Cora collected the kids and scooted them back up the trail. “I’m going to keep trying to call someone,” she said. 

I unfastened my skis and instructed Dave to do the same.  

“We need to get him off this tree,” I said. 

“You mean we should pull it out?”

I took off my mitts and closed my fingers around the branch. It didn’t seem too rubbery or thick. “I think I can crack it,” I said.

“Is that wise?” 

“If we pull him loose,” I said, “I don’t know what else is coming out after.” I gave the stalk a ginger tug. “Does that hurt?”

“I don’t think he can hear you.”  

“Papa,” Wayne moaned. 

I got Dave to grab hold of Wayne round the waist. “You keep him upright,” I said. “You don’t let him budge an inch.”   

Dave nodded. I seized the branch in my fist, applying the slightest twist, and bent down hard. The branch broke apart in a clean crack but the force sent Wayne spilling from Dave’s grip. He landed hard on his ass with his skis poking out, and immediately brought his gloves to his face. 

“Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!” I hollered. 

I threw myself on top of him, wrapping my arms around Wayne’s chest, snaring him in a wrestler’s grapple. “Okay, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s alright. Calm down. We’re going to get you some help.” 

***

They wouldn’t risk sending a helicopter through the scrub, but the dispatcher Cora spoke to assured her that Ski Patrol was en route and that EMS would receive our injured party at the trailhead. 

I sat with my back slumped against the offending tree. We’d unhooked Wayne’s skis, and he lay flopped between my open legs. I held onto his stomach, swaddling him.

“You want us to wait with you?” Dave asked. 

“No,” I said. “It’s too cold for that. You guys get back to the cars. Let them know we’re maybe 800m west of the Fire Lookout. They won’t miss us.”

Rebecca shook off her gloves and passed me two handwarmers. “Here,” she said, “try using these.”

We waited, Wayne and I, for what felt like hours, days, in the moist and noiseless cold.

Wayne drifted in and out of consciousness, gibbering all sorts of nonsense. “I’ve got three dogs and one dog,” he confided. “And both of them are made up of the same unique dog.” A half-pencil of branch protruded from his eye. The lid wanted to close but couldn’t. This desire for closure (or—fucked if I know—respectful concealment?) presented itself with such fervour that even his lashes seemed engaged in the effort. 

“Stop blinking,” I said. “I know it hurts, but you’re going to tear that lid in half.” 

Ski Patrol was just some jackleg yokel named Trevor whom Parks Canada kept on retainer through the weekends who happened to own a sled. His snowmobile was a pale grey relic with a square hood and acrylic windscreen. We lowered Wayne into the sled’s trough, belting him in with a harness, and fastened our skis and poles to the rails of the caboose. 

Trevor started the ignition. An acrid mist spumed from a wonky exhaust pipe sutured in jade header tape. “Alright,” he said. “Where to?” 

***

I made the drive back to Calgary as fast as I could. I’d hoped to arrive at the Foothills Hospital before Janie, but by the time I finally found parking, she texted to say she was already there.  

“What’s our status?” 

“They brought him into OR right from the helipad,” Janie said. “Traumatic globe rupture with an embedded foreign body. That’s what they’re calling it. I guess they stabilized the eye and pumped him full of antibiotics on the ride in, which’ll hopefully reduce the chances of infection. They gave him a general anesthetic and he’s in surgery now and we’re just waiting to hear from the ophthalmologist about next steps.”

“Did they get the stick?”

“They got the stick,” my daughter said. 

“Well, hell,” I said. “That’s something, right?”

It was just after four, but to go by the garb (forest-green parka, too-short varsity sweatpants with a scabby blue cougar fading over the knee), mussed hair, and deeply bagged eyes, you’d think Janie was in the throes of a weekslong vigil; not that, fashion-wise, I, of the Rossignol windbreaker and matching spandex, musky and silt-splotched, was one to talk. I placed a hand over Janie’s and squeezed it. “We just take things one step at a time, okay?” 

Janie squirmed away her hand. “They told me once he’s through seeing the ophthalmologist, they’re going to transfer him to a room upstairs.” She wakened her phone and clicked it off again. “But that could be hours. The nurse or whoever said she had no idea how long that’d take. Said someone would call and let us know when they were moving him.”

We found some seats outside a quiet cafeteria, not far from the elevators and gift shop. I bought us coffees, chips, a gluey bran muffin threaded in carrot, but Janie wasn’t interested in eating. She worked the corrugated sleeve off her coffee cup and tore it in half; and then again, slower this time, lips pursed, halving the half. A pair of men in blush scrubs and surgical caps exited the elevator wheeling a heavy grey bin. Janie crept her mess to the edge of the table with the base of her cup, and refreshed her phone. 

“You can’t will it,” I said. 

Janie ignored me, skimmed.  

“It’ll ring when it rings,” I said.  

“I know,” she said. “It’s just—" An older woman with an oxygen tank leashed to her rollator came strolling past. “I hate hospitals,” she said. 

This was true. Beset with bad childhood asthma (an affliction, I’m happy to report, Janie’s long since overcome), those poor sweet chugging coughs turning up amber with sputum, we’d spent, the three of us—back when there were three—frantic hours in the pediatric ward at the Bow Valley Centre; and then, too, she would’ve been eleven, twelve, going on twelve, I suppose, when, early, one late-summer evening, a white pickup, piloted by a young man (whose name I am pretending to forget) blowing a .24 BAC, throttled through an intersection about a block away from our home—just past the little dog park and unfenced softball field off Huntley where, on dewy Sunday mornings, Janie and I would kick the soccer ball around, a pair of bookbags serving for our net—occasioning the collision that precipitated the trauma that resulted in the brain bleed that hastened the coma that—skip it. Three years ago, I’d overnighted at Rockyview General following a routine gallbladder surgery, and yet, the sight of me in gowns, bedridden, woozy, sent Janie collapsing to the floor like luggage pitched from a carousel. It was only then, as the attending nurse rushed her, unwinding her scarf and loosening the collar of the blouse she wore buttoned right up to the stem of her throat, that I comprehended the full extent of my daughter’s phobia. I bottomed my coffee.       

“Why don’t you go home?” I said. 

“Dad—” 

“I’m serious,” I said, and I was. “What’s the sense both of us running ourselves down? Said yourself they had no idea how long this might take. We both need our rest. You especially.”  

“You’re sure?” Janie asked. She wasn’t putting up a fight.  

“Positive,” I said. “Go.”  

***

I’m not going to dwell on the eye.  

Though it’s worth noting, I think, that I’d expected a bandage, a patch; there was no bandage, no patch, no puck of gauze. Merely the eye, swollen and stickless and luridly contused. His iris pulsed an icy, enigmatic blue, and something bad had happened to the pupil. The centre wouldn’t hold; by which I mean the ink had slid some, and a dash of pupil stretched blackly across the distended iris, dwindling in the twitchy, bloodshot swell of his white. There was a slight rip on the lash, also; and the cut, gilded in orange antiseptic, resembled a lasagna’s molten fringe. I tried, as best I could, to ignore all of this, the eye, the lash, my desperate metaphors, but no dice; Wayne’s other eye—the unwounded one—seemed to force my gaze. 

In the cot next to Wayne, slept an older man, spectre-thin, snoring. A stack of books—Cussler, Nesbø, Benjamin Black—sat atop the sleeping man’s bedside table, along with a pink teddy bear with a cloth cast hooped around its shoulder, a deck of cards, and an open bag of toiletries (toothbrush, comb, electric trimmer). The shape of his body was marvelous—so frail that the outline of his sternum rose up through his bedsheets like an ascot. I pulled up a stool next to Wayne and petted his shin. 

“Doctor tells me you’ll make it,” I said, and tried for a laugh.  

Wayne sickled his lips, grimaced. 

“I texted Janie,” I said. “I sent her home to get some rest.” I stood up from the stool and paced. It was nearing nine but seemed far later. “She hasn’t answered yet.” 

Between the two beds a window gave onto a wooded courtyard around which meandered a lighted pea gravel path. The courtyard was empty and the window unopening. I pressed my forehead to the glass and released a weak breath, scribbling my initials in the fog. I looked down at Wayne. Unoiled, the hairs of his moustache had started to stiffen and clod, curling over his lips, a parched and bristly thicket. He opened his lips as if to speak but said nothing.   

What happened next evolved with the guileless simplicity of a dream; I knew what I was doing, and knew that my actions might well carry considerable, if not criminal, repercussions   (necessitating some later atonement), but I seemed miraculously incapable of reversing course. Speedily I walked from one end of the room to the other and shut the door. I selected the trimmer from the sleeping man’s toiletry bag and gaged its thrum. It was a fine trimmer, with strong steel blades, adjustable guards, and a nifty grape toggle. I drew the curtain around Wayne’s bed, and reawakened the trimmer. Wayne’s eyes made a roll. A leg shot out from under his covers and he swiped and groped at my jacket. I tried holding him down with my left (my non-grooming) hand but he kept on wriggling and grabbing. I hopped up on the bed, then, and clamped his shoulders down with my knees. The sleeping man cleared his throat. “Hello,” he said. “Who’s that? Hello?” We sat there a minute, puzzled and idle. A calmness appeared to overtake Wayne. He sighed, and I felt his shoulders slack. I shifted some of my weight from his chest and sank the trimmer—humming warmly in my palm—over his lips, working the blades against the grain. Snips of stubble bolted over my thumb as I pivoted the instrument around to get at the tufts of darker hair clustered up inside his nostrils, clinging to the narrow, boogerless bridge of his septum, like fiends.    

Wayne remained quite silent throughout, and I think it fair to say I admired this. I admired his constancy. When I was finished, when my work was finally done, I stepped off the cot, released the curtains, wiped the blades clean on my spandex, and quietly returned the trimmer to the sleeping man’s bag. Then I fetched a few tissues from the wash station opposite Wayne’s bed. They were the cheaper sort, coarser and scratchier than what I use at home. I formed as soft a fold of them as I could and dusted at Wayne’s cheeks and chin where much of the stubble had scattered. He didn’t look terrible. I backed away from the bed as Wayne opened his eyes, motioning for the small vanity mirror above the sink. I proceeded to the sink but stopped. What was I going to tell Janie? What possible justification might I give? That I was sorry but that I loved her? That I could think of no better way to express this love than to exact immediate, unwavering vengeance upon her husband’s moustache?   

“Shh,” the sleeping man admonished me. “Be quiet. Some of us are trying to convalesce.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”  

I came back to the bed and sat down. Wayne snapped his fingers at me and pointed to the mirror. “Right,” I said. I reached into my pocket and showed him his face on my phone.  

***  

Rod Moody-Corbett is the author of Hides (Breakwater Books), a Globe and Mail pick for Best Summer Reads of 2024 and a #1 Alberta bestseller. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story and serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.